Why we built this

Every product AKdev publishes starts the same way. Something we needed, where what already existed was priced well beyond what the job was worth, or was available and simply not very good. Crub is the garden one.

Crub is for the bit after the photo. Identifying a plant is the easy half, and it is the half everything else stops at. You get a name, possibly the right one, and then you are on your own — back to searching for whether the thing wants sun, when to cut it back, and whether the one that came up beside it is a seedling or a weed.

Crub is built around the assumption that the name is the beginning. Identify something, put it where it actually grows, and the care, bloom, planting and harvest calendars follow from that — tuned to your part of the world rather than to a generic season. The journal is there because a garden is a long argument with yourself, and the useful half of it is what happened last year.

Where the names come from

Every answer is backed by a curated reference of more than 150,000 plants, mushrooms and insects — proper names, clear photographs and how to look after them. Curating that is the actual work, and it is the reason an identification is worth anything: a name with nothing behind it is a guess with better presentation.

Each identification carries a confidence match: how closely your photograph fits the nearest entry in the library. A high match means the photograph resembles the reference closely — it does not mean anyone has looked at it. Clear, well-lit shots of leaves, flowers or the whole plant give the most reliable results; bare stems, seedlings and anything in poor light are where identification is weakest, and the number is the honest signal of that.

Identification is a suggestion, not a determination, and the app says so where it matters. Nothing in Crub should be treated as advice on whether a mushroom or a plant is safe to eat. If you are foraging, confirm with an expert who is standing next to it.

Where the model is, and what it is for

Two things in Crub use a model. Identification runs one over your photograph and matches what it finds against the reference library. Recommendations run one over what you already grow, where you grow it and what your region does, and suggest what might go well beside it.

Both propose; neither decides. An identification is a suggestion with a confidence figure attached, and a recommendation is an opinion about a garden the model has never stood in. The care notes and the calendars underneath both come from the curated library rather than being generated, and the journal is yours — Crub does not write it, summarise it or have a view about it.

Your photographs and your garden are used to answer what you asked, and for nothing else. They are not sold and they are not shared. A model runs where it does the work and nowhere else — why that matters to us.

Who builds it

Crub is built and published by AKdev Ltd, a small independent software studio registered in Scotland, Companies House number SC892925. It is not venture funded and there is no second revenue line. The subscriptions are the business, which is why the privacy policy can promise there is nothing here to sell.

Small cuts both ways and it is worth saying which ways. Support reaches the people who build the product rather than a tier of it, so answers tend to be direct and reasonably quick. It also means work happens in an order rather than in parallel, and a request that would be a sprint somewhere larger may simply be a no here. If what you need is a platform with a roadmap and an account manager, that is a legitimate requirement and this is not it.

What happens to your data

Your plants, plans, jobs and journal are yours, and you can export them.

Retention, deletion and export are governed by AKdev’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, which cover every app it publishes. If Crub were ever discontinued you would be given notice and a window to take everything with you — that commitment lives in the Terms rather than only on this page.

Getting in touch

The contact form reaches us directly, or email hello@crub.ai. AKdev’s wider work is at ak.dev.