Health, home and travel decision
Habits Garden
A capable developer can build and maintain a reasonably close replacement (web/PWA, basics of gamification and reminders) using existing open-source habit apps as prior art; you would give up the vendor’s native apps, polish, and userbase.
Visit website↗Built by Marc Lou, who ships 32 products in this index
$5/mo
$60/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$15/mo3 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Habits Garden alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Users create/complete daily habits → mark completions → update visual garden/quests/leaderboard → receive reminders and daily tips
What it still won’t have
- Polished native iOS/Android apps (official mobile builds and App Store/Play integrations)
- The vendor’s existing userbase/leaderboard scale and cross-user social features
- Designer-provided visuals, polished animations, and branding assets
- Built-in lifetime plan handling and payments UI
- Ongoing product updates and feature backlog maintained by the original developer
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Habits Garden clone as a responsive PWA using Next.js (React) + Tailwind, a PostgreSQL database (hosted on Supabase), and Supabase Auth. Core features in scope: user signup/login and public profile, create/edit/delete habits with scheduling, mark habit completions and compute streaks, a visual 'garden' view mapping habits to simple plant growth states, daily reminder emails (using an SMTP/email provider) and scheduled jobs (serverless cron) to reset daily check windows, and a single shared leaderboard. Out of scope: native App Store/Play builds, payments, complex animations, and social feed. Include error handling, input validation, background job retry logic, unit tests for API endpoints, and deployment instructions (Vercel or similar) with a sane dev seed dataset.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productHabits Garden - Home
- official pricingHabits Garden - Pricing
- open sourcedohsimpson/HabitTrove
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
