Yes — you can design your landscape for free. Sow is a free landscape design app for iPhone and Android that turns a photo of your yard into a design built from real plants: cultivars you can actually buy at a nursery, matched to your USDA hardiness zone, sunlight and space.
Most "free" landscape apps fall into two camps. AI-image apps generate a pretty picture in seconds, but the plants in it are often invented — they don't exist, or won't survive your winters. Manual drag-and-drop apps give you a blank canvas and lock the useful plant catalog behind a paywall. Sow was built to fix both: every design is generated from a 10,000+ plant library of real outdoor plants, so the result is a plan you can plant, not AI guesswork.
Free to download, free to start designing
Sow is free to download on iPhone and Android, and you can start designing straight away. Without paying you can photograph your space and see it redesigned with real plants, save the plants you like into your own library, set up a space or board to keep a project in, and browse the community's real yards for ideas.
A paid plan unlocks the rest: the full plant library, watermark-free designs, yard mapping, weather-aware care, and access on the web. But you get to see it work on your own yard before any of that.
Why free AI landscape apps disappoint
AI makeover apps are great at producing an inspiring image and terrible at producing a shopping list. When the picture is done you still don't know what the plants are, whether they fit your zone, how big they get, or what they cost. That gap is where most projects stall.
Sow closes it: every plant in a Sow design is labeled with its real name and cultivar, and one tap shows its hardiness zones, mature size, sun needs and care profile. When you're ready to plant, Sow compares availability and prices across online nurseries.
Design in the yard, refine on a bigger screen
Your designs, plant collections, maps and garden data sync between the Sow app and usesow.com, so you can sketch an idea on your phone while standing in the yard and pick the same project up later on a desktop. Web access is part of the paid plans.
