Gardyn Reviews 473

First, they charged my credit card for a membership that I didn't sign up for. They must automatically enroll you for yearly membership renew without your choosing that option. It states on their account that they do not store your credit card information so how did they charge my card?
Secondly, it is ridiculously expensive and you get very little vegetables for the effort. I figure it has cost me 100 dollars per bowl of salad I've harvested.
Customer service is a joke. Do not buy....

I have two now, I could not resist a sale on a refurbished Studio. Their customer service is excellent, always responsive quickly and always made any problem right.
The unit is sturdy and easy to clean. It may be utilitarian looking to some but after plants grow in you can't see the unit at all, which is the point. I looked for several years before getting one and have not regretted it a single moment.

The Gardyn 2.0 that I received is a very poorly made product. I think the issue is a lack of quality control, because it appears that some people get lucky and get a device that works for a while. Since the control board should be in a water-safe container, there is no reason for it to fail other than poor workmanship. But the lack of customer support on a proven unreliable model for a device that is this expensive is ludicrous

I got my Gardyn Home this time last year, and honestly, I couldn’t be happier! Growing my own crisp, fresh veggies has been such a treat. Living in an apartment, I never thought I’d get to grow what i like to eat, but Gardyn made it so easy and fun!

We bought a Gardyn 2.0 used, and were able to get it up and running without much issue. Over the last 18 months it's worked ok. There were a couple times where I needed to unplug and reset it. A couple months into owning it, the power supply died. Gardyn wanted $100 for a replacement. Thankfully you can easily find compatible replacements (with better specs) for about $20-30, so I went with that.
After replacing the power supply it ran for about a year until this last weekend when the gardyn died. After running through all the troubleshooting steps it was obviously dead. I contacted support and their fix was to replace the entire lid. Normally that would cost $350, but they were willing to give me one at a discount for $190.
That seemed ridiculously expensive for what it was, so I decided I'd take a look at things myself. I was warned that opening the lid would permanently void my warranty (though it was dead anyway). It was only a couple of small screws to open it up and I could see that they were using a regular Raspberry Pi Zero. After a little troubleshooting, it became obvious that the only problem was that the SD card in the Raspberry Pi was dead. So I contacted support again asking for the software so I could put it on a new SD card and get everything back up and running. They refused claiming it was full of copyrighted software, and that the only fix available was to pay for the whole new lid. Now that I had a look at what I was dealing with, I realized how insanely overpriced this replacement part is. The Raspberry Pi is only $15, and none of the other sensors or bits would be much more than that, and that's at single item prices. I'm sure they're purchasing these parts at bulk and getting them significantly cheaper. I doubt one of those lids costs them more than $60, and they wanted me to buy one at a "discounted" price of 3x that, rather than just providing me with what I actually needed: a cheap $5 SD card (that again I'm sure they're getting in bulk). I think they're banking on people getting desperate as they watch their beloved plants die.

The Gardyn system looks great at first glance with convenient setup, and an appealing promise of AI-assisted indoor gardening. Unfortunately, the experience doesn’t quite live up to the marketing.

Gardyn advertises Kelby as an intelligent assistant, but it’s really just a series of scheduled reminders. It doesn’t “analyze” your plants or know what you’re growing, the cameras simply take periodic snapshots. There’s no real object detection or adaptive learning happening, just automated notifications.

The membership isn’t about added value; it’s about recurring revenue. Your credits expire after 30, forcing you to place monthly orders instead of building up credits for bulk purchases. This undermines the product’s sustainability pitch, constant shipping and packaging waste negate the eco-friendly narrative.

The customer service team is polite, but replies often feel like they’re copied from AI-generated templates. Ironically, Gardyn uses more AI in their email and Facebook responses than in the actual product. On 2 of their Facebook posts they legit left the [insert url here] tag and had to edit the posts after folks noticed.

Many seeds arrive loose or missing from their yCubes, and germination rates are noticeably low. This becomes frustrating when you’ve already invested in the device and membership.

Gardyn is a beautifully designed product with a lot of potential, but the marketing overpromises and the business model underdelivers. If you’re looking for genuine AI-driven smart gardening, this isn’t it. If you’re okay with a semi-manual hydroponic setup that looks nice, it might still work for you, just go in knowing what you’re actually getting.

We've had our Gardyn for about two years now and love it! I will say that some of our pods come and don't grow much before needing to be replaced but overall we have great harvests! Some things grow easier than others but for what we want to grow (lettuces, spinach, cucumbers, chives, chard, peppers, and tomatoes we are good and buying less plastic wrapped veggies at the store. We grow what we want and use what we grow... I was surprised about the reviews however and I do think their tech support team can use lots of help.. they are not great at responding and let the app do all of the talking.

purchased the system about two years ago. It worked beautifully for the first few months, but for over a year now, I haven’t seen a single plant grow.

I’ve sent countless emails, made numerous calls, and while they did send replacement parts, the system still doesn’t work. At one point, I even asked if they could just replace the entire unit since it clearly seems defective. The answer? No. Instead, it’s on you, the customer, to spend hours troubleshooting and reassembling everything.

I’ve followed every single step they provided—multiple times. What’s even more frustrating is that the company seems to have no record of past communications. Every time I reach out, I’m forced to explain the entire issue from the beginning—over a year of back and forth, completely ignored.

At this point, I’m ready to throw the system away. So much time, money, and energy wasted. I truly wanted to love my Gardyn, but the experience has been nothing short of exhausting and disappoint

I recently deep-cleaned my Gardyn 2.0, a process that routinely takes around six hours. Upon reassembling the device, I discovered the water pump no longer functioned. After contacting Gardyn's live chat support and following their guidance—which included sending photos of the lid's underside—I was informed that the entire lid needed replacement at a cost of $190, plus tax, shipping, and handling. Considering the high initial price of this product, the extensive ongoing maintenance it requires, and the fact that such a critical component failed just two years after purchase, this is extremely frustrating.

Additionally, the tubing provided by Gardyn is of very poor quality, consistently breaking down. Shortly after my initial purchase, the original tubes had to be replaced. Even the replacement tubing required me to patch several holes to maintain functionality.

Furthermore, Gardyn decided—without my consent—to activate features from their Kelby service, despite my never signing up for it. This included altering my lighting schedule to their default preference, requiring me to manually reset it to my desired settings. It's puzzling why Gardyn would make changes to my personal settings without providing an opt-out option.

Their customer support is also lacking. The only phone number I could find directs callers back to online resources before abruptly ending the call, making direct phone support effectively nonexistent. Moreover, the live chat representative refused to share their support number or even acknowledge my request. I've been promised a call back within 24 hours, but meanwhile, my plants continue to suffer due to the non-functional unit.

When functioning correctly, the Gardyn system is great; however, given the premium price point, the poor quality components, inadequate customer support, and frequent maintenance issues, the overall experience has become deeply frustrating.

Just connected. Everything is good. Realized Kirby runs it all with a fee, membership. I will not pay membership to grow food. Disappointed why Gardyn choose to charge for us too buy and grow for an additional cost. Why Gardyn has not given nonmembers the resources to grow. The informational needs to grow without membership.

It didn't grow much food and I haven't used it in over six months. I was surprised today to see a charge of 734.02 for membership. Was never explained to me that I would be charged that amount of money for something that doesn't grow that well. Can't get anyone to answer phone. Disputing the charge and canceled service. BEWARE!

Most items seem to be back ordered have been waiting weeks for my order. The support is pretty terrible. The chat function doesn’t work if you have a question about a current purchase or tracking but if you have questions about buying a new Gardyn the chat function works. Have been emailing customer support for the last week and they don’t know their own product as the response the give a day later for a current purchase contradicts their own website help pages. Be careful purchasing if you aren’t prepared to wait several weeks for shipping and very poor slow support that seems set up to sell and not help existing customers.

Love the concept but unfortunately, not producing enough to justified the 41 dollars a month on top of the device cost.

I've had a Gardyn 3.0 for a little over 5 months. At first I loved it and enjoyed having it. But, after refreshing the tank and repowering, it stopped working. The red light is on, but no lights, pumps or WiFi. I meticulously worked through all of their trouble shooting steps four or five times. The only "support" is by email. But two days later, by reply. They have a chat support where I waited 4 hours but no response. The only phone number to find is from the better business bureau site, which leads to an unserviced voice mailbox. My expensive plants are dieing. I'm paying for a premium subscription, but get zero customer service. What a crappy company.

I purchased this almost 2 months ago. I listened to all the hype and thought it to be a great idea. Reality, however, is much different. Some of the items never germinated and others are not bigger than a pencil eraser. I looked through the plant directory and projected times for harvest times. At this point, if I took everything off the unit I might have enough for 2 salads for one meal. Makes for a very, very expensive sald.

Still no response from GARDYN since April, when whole system went down!!! I would expect at least an answer online. This company WILL NOT address problems, but they are quick to charge your credit card $400+ annual membership for support.

The subscription model is just crazy.

Great concept horrible business practices! My unit needed to be replaced because the pump didn’t work. The camera didn’t work. The light didn’t work and the plants were not growing because they were not getting water. Now they want to charge me for the return on the other unit which I cannot get in the box, then I read that they use refurbished parts and those to replace their broken parts on their original unit. I guess that’s why they’re so insistent that I try to return this old one that I can’t even fit in the box and they’ve threatened to charge me for both lots of luck with that.

Garydn is selling "subtractively licensed" (read: "partially disabled") products. You pay $700 for an indoor hydroponic garden, and find out after you purchase it that you've got to pay them every month indefinitely in order to have any indication of low water levels.

It's just lights and a water pump with a couple of timers, people. There's literally no reason for this to be online.

It would've been simple enough to just put a float indicator on this unit, because I walk past it multiple times a day in my house, but they're not interested in a functional product. They're only interested in turning a profit off of this poor excuse for a turnkey hydroponic solution.

Add to that: mine simply stopped working one day, and although they initially sent me an email that a replacement lid would be shipped within 10 days, I found out later that below that notification in the same email, they were requesting me to respond to confirm I understood they planned to ship me a used replacement lid.

Skip forward to where I went back to find out why I hadn't gotten a shipment notification like they said I would, and I finally noticed they were waiting for me to respond... so I responded and asked them to please ship the lid as they indicated.

And now they're asking me to do the troubleshooting steps over again, as if anything would've magically been fixed by sitting there for 10+ days.

I think it is probably simpler, more effective (and *far* cheaper) to just build my own automatic indoor garden with a shelving unit, an aquarium pump, and a bucket of water.

The plants are dead, folks(oh, by the way, there's a way to manually water the plants, but it's too late for that now).

Hands down the worst consumer experience I’ve had in the last decade. The product broke. Customer service was nowhere to be found. After hours of time and months of higher electricity bills the plants died. And the company wasn’t willing to stand behind its product or its service. Buyer beware.