Everything to know before you sign up

Founding is a conversation, not checkout — there is a short form at https://roottend.com/founding-interest, and we follow up. For Standard or Plus: a few minutes. Choose a plan and monthly or yearly billing, enter your garden center, and pay. You're signed in after checkout completes — RootTend seeds a starter set of guarantee and weather rules automatically, so there's nothing to configure before your first purchase can be registered. You can fine-tune the rules, guarantee window, and wording anytime from the dashboard.

No. The usual checkout change is a few lines of text on the receipt: a short URL and a note to go there to register. The customer types the ticket number. A QR code is optional if you want a scan. Staff can also add a purchase from the dashboard, you can bulk-import an existing customer/purchase list as a CSV, or — if your POS can email a sales report — you forward it to an address RootTend generates for you and it's imported automatically.

No. The dashboard is a website. Putting it on a phone home screen is optional — about 30 seconds in Safari (Share → Add to Home Screen) — and on iPhone it is what makes claim alerts work. It is not a POS install and not required to run the counter.

Yes, via the CSV import on the Customers page. It's forgiving about column naming and order, and any optional field you leave out — phone number, preferred contact method — just falls back to a sensible default instead of failing the row.

For Standard or Plus: your garden center's name, zip code (used for local frost and heat forecasts), your name and email, a plan, and monthly or yearly billing. Card details are collected on Stripe after that, and you can sign in only once payment completes. Founding does not go through that checkout — use the form on the site and we'll set you up.

$159/mo for a single location with up to 5,000 registered customers, or $249/mo above that or for more than one location. Both plans include everything RootTend does — the price tracks the size of your list, not which features you unlock.

No setup fee, and there's no contract — plans are month-to-month. An Admin can close the account from Settings. That stops future billing, and you have 30 days to sign back in and keep the account before customer and staff data is deleted.

Use RootTend through spring. If you don't think it paid for itself by June 1, email us and we'll refund everything you've paid since signup. No forms, no conditions, no conversation about it.

Yes. Pay for ten months, get twelve. Standard is $1,590/yr paid up front and Plus is $2,490/yr, which suits garden centers who'd rather settle it once in the winter than think about it every month.

A limited number of founding spots are still open. If that sounds like a fit, tell us about your store and we'll follow up. The rate is $79/mo, locked in for as long as you stay a customer. In exchange we ask for a short call once a month, permission to talk publicly about how it's going in your store, and one introduction to another garden center. It is not self-serve — the form is at https://roottend.com/founding-interest.

We'll tell you before we change anything, and you can decide then. Nothing stops working and no overage charge appears on your bill — the tiers exist so pricing scales with the size of your list, not to catch you out.

No. RootTend sends every confirmation, care reminder, weather alert, and claim message through its own email and text-messaging accounts, and that's included in your subscription. There's no per-message charge, and no separate email or SMS provider for you to sign up for.

Yes — switch between Standard and Plus, or move to yearly billing. To stop the subscription, an Admin closes the account from Settings (same 30-day window to come back).

A customer registers their purchase — from the URL on the receipt (they type the ticket number), optionally by scanning a QR, or by staff entering it — which starts a guarantee window (365 days by default, adjustable per garden center in Settings). Before that window closes, they can get a reminder only a store that tracked the sale is in a position to send. If a plant doesn't make it, the customer opens a claim from their confirmation email or text, and it lands directly in your dashboard's claims queue.

Yes. Every claim has a message thread with the customer built in — ask about watering, sun exposure, or request a photo that wasn't included — sent by email or text, whichever they prefer. The full back-and-forth is kept on record alongside the claim.

If you publish a policy, that is the reason most stores buy RootTend: you can stand behind it without a spreadsheet, and you can tell a customer the window is closing because you actually know when it started. If you don't publish a guarantee, you still get registration, weather targeting, care emails, and Ask the bench. You can leave the claims queue unused. There's no separate cheaper plan for that, because it's the same product.

Rules watch for conditions like frost, heat waves, drought, and the first safe planting week for your zip code, and only message the customers who bought a plant category actually at risk from that condition — a frost warning doesn't go to everyone on your list, only to people with something frost-sensitive on file.

Yes — every default rule (wording, timing, which plant categories it targets) is editable from the dashboard's Rules page, and you can add rules of your own.

A place on the dashboard for a question at the counter. Answers come from this store's care library — the same guides your team already uses — and every answer names its sources as tags so staff can check before they pass it to a customer. It will say when the library does not have it rather than invent a practice.

No. Every garden center's customers, purchases, and claims are isolated to that account only.

Yes — they pick their preferred contact method when they register a purchase, and staff can add or update a customer's phone number and channel preference anytime from the Customers page. SMS program terms (frequency, STOP/HELP, support) are at https://roottend.com/sms-terms.

An Admin closes the account from Settings (type the garden center name to confirm). You and your team can still sign in for 30 days and choose Keep my account. After 30 days we delete customer and staff records. Stripe keeps the invoices; we keep Stripe customer and subscription ids on a stub row. An export is not yet self-serve — email support@roottend.com if you need one during that window.

Email support@roottend.com — a real person reads it, not a ticket queue.