Meet the Microgreen Tracker: The App We Built to Track Our Grows

August 8, 2026

If you grow microgreens, you already know the hardest part is not the growing. It is keeping track of everything. Which tray needs water today, which one is due to come out of blackout, when the broccoli will be ready, and what it all actually cost you. We spent years answering those questions with whiteboards, spreadsheets, phone notes, and a lot of guessing. So we built something better.

The Microgreen Tracker is grow-management software for microgreens. It tracks every tray through its real growing stages, turns the whole grow room into one short daily task list, projects harvest dates, costs each tray out down to the electricity, and plans your plantings against the orders you actually have. It works in any phone or desktop browser, it installs to your home screen, and every new grower starts with a 7-day free trial of the whole app at www.microgreentracker.com.

Microgreen Tracker app dashboard on a phone showing tray tasks in front of On The Grow microgreens

What is the Microgreen Tracker?

At its simplest, it is a tool that always knows where every one of your trays is and what it needs today. Open it in the morning and your trays are already sorted into clear groups: what to pre-soak, what to plant, what to water, what to move to the next stage, and what to harvest. Instead of trying to remember it all, you work the list.

A few things to clear up right away, because we want this to be honest from the start:

It is a subscription. Every new grower starts with a 7-day free trial of the complete app, and it continues as a monthly or yearly subscription unless you cancel before the trial ends.
It is a responsive web app that installs to your home screen, not something you download from an app store. It works in any browser on your phone, tablet, or computer.
It sends push notifications for watering, harvest day, and deliveries, at times you choose. These are web push notifications on your phone, so there are no emails or texts.
It scales with you. The same interface handles one tray on a kitchen shelf or thousands of active trays against customer orders.

If you are brand new to all of this, our beginner's guide to growing microgreens and our complete step-by-step grow guide are the best places to start learning how to grow first. The app is built to sit right alongside that knowledge.

It sets itself up before you even walk in

Most tools drop you into an empty dashboard and leave you to figure it out. The Microgreen Tracker does the opposite. When you start your free trial, you create your login and then go through a short series of setup questions before you ever reach the dashboard. Your answers actually configure the account, so by the time you get in, the app is ready to grow.

It starts with the look you like, light or dark and a color palette. Then you choose between two paths:

Track Everything is for growers who want the full toolkit. About twenty short screens walk you through your clock and units, the tray sizes and growing mediums you use, your seeds and their bags, your grow recipes, feed, power for your lights, a first tray setup, and your reminders. Growers who do not track costs skip four of the money screens. When it is done, your first tray is one tap away.
Keep It Simple is for growers who just want the basics. It is four quick screens, and it turns on Simple Mode for you.

Setup finishes on a summary and then the plan screen, where you pick a plan to start your 7-day free trial on. The card is taken there, nothing is charged until the seven days are up, and the screen spells out exactly what happens on day eight. You can cancel any time, and everything you record during the trial stays on your account, so nothing starts over when the subscription begins. It is one trial per account.

Simple Mode: just the basics, for one tray or a few

Not everybody wants a farm management system, and they should not have to use one. If you grow one or two trays on a shelf and just want to know what to do today, Simple Mode is for you. Choose Keep It Simple during setup, or flip it on any time in Settings, and the app becomes calm and quiet:

Navigation shrinks to three places: Home, My Grows, and Plant.
Home becomes a plain task list that tells you what each tray needs next.
Grams, water volumes, and costs step out of the way, while the stage, the day count, and the harvest date stay.
Planting becomes seed-first. Pick the crop and variety, confirm the sow weight, say how many trays, and go. The app fills in the schedule from its crop data.
Supplies shows only seeds and growing mediums, and there are basic mediums like soil, coco, and reusable silicone ready to pick, so you can plant without ever setting up inventory.

The best part is that it is only a different view of the same app. Nothing is blocked, deleted, or recalculated, and it is a per-person setting. Turn it off whenever you are ready for more and the full app is right where you left it, with everything you logged along the way. If you start with one tray and end up with ten racks, you never have to switch tools.

It comes loaded with our microgreen data

This is the part we are proudest of. You do not have to know how much seed to weigh out, how long to keep a crop in blackout, or how many days until harvest, because the app already does. We poured years of first-hand growing into the crop library, so all 81 crops and 286 varieties come with a suggested sow weight, presoak time, weighted and blackout timing, and days to harvest built right in.

Pick a crop and a tray size and the app fills in the numbers for you. Sow density is stored per square inch, so a suggested 30 grams on a 10x20 automatically becomes 15 grams on a 10x10, or scales to a 7x14, a 5x5, or a custom tray without you doing any math. When you are growing several crops on different tray sizes at once, that alone saves a lot of second-guessing.

None of it is locked in. Every value is a starting point you can override, per crop, per variety, or for a single tray, because your seed, your water, and your grow space are not identical to ours. But you are never staring at an empty box wondering what to type. You are getting a tracking tool and our growing data in the same place.

Microgreen Tracker Add Tray screen showing a broccoli tray batch preview with sow weight and estimated harvest window

As simple or as detailed as you want

Growing is already complex enough. Hand-written notes take real time to keep up, and if you ever want to learn something from them, you have to sit down later and turn all that scribbling into usable data. The Microgreen Tracker skips that step. You log as you go, and the data is already data.

How much detail you track is your call, even tray by tray. Prefer to water once a day instead of twice? Set that. Like to leave a crop in blackout an extra day? Extend the stage by one day with a tap. Every tray can run in one of four ways: full tracking with stage and watering tasks, water reminders only, stage reminders only, or recordkeeping only, where the tray is simply logged and never nags you. You shape the app around how you grow, not the other way around.

Why we built it (a long time coming)

We have wanted this app since 2019. If you have watched much of our YouTube channel, you already know why. We are the growers who run the experiments, the side-by-side tray tests, and the endless how-tos, and every one of those depended on keeping good grow data. We loved recording it. We just hated how we had to do it.

The real nightmare was the number of variables. Different crops, different mediums, different fertilizers, different seeding densities, all going at once. Trying to keep that straight on a whiteboard or a spreadsheet falls apart fast. Which trays got watered today and which did not? What went into that batch three weeks ago? What did the whole thing actually cost? By the time you reconstruct it, the grow is long gone.

We have been growing microgreens since 2018, and we kept hitting that same wall, which has nothing to do with seed or light. Even keeping two or three full grow racks going at different stages, the tracking becomes the bottleneck. We tried whiteboards. We tried spreadsheets. We tried phone notes and even fancy digital writing pads, all of which we had to fill out every single time, for every single tray, all throughout the grow process.

It got even more real when we moved commercial production into our mobile grow trailer, keeping a couple of grow racks going at a time in a small footprint through Texas summers. And we know plenty of growers running hundreds of trays who hit the same wall, just sooner. We needed something that thought about a grow the way we actually grow, not a generic to-do app bent to fit.

So we tried to have it built. Over the years we approached firm after firm to design it, and they all came back with outlandish quotes and no straight answer on whether the thing would even function the way a real grower needs it to. Eventually CJ stopped waiting and learned to build it himself. After more than a year of work, it is finally here. This is the app we always wished existed, made by the people who actually needed it.

Here's a look at the kind of grow space this app was built around.

It understands how a grow actually works

This is the part that makes the whole thing tick. Every tray moves through the real growing stages the software understands: planned, pre-soaking, planted, the germination step (weighted or non-weighted) or blackout, in light, ready, and harvested, plus a failed state for the grows that do not make it. You start a tray at whatever stage matches your process, and the app records the full timeline for you.

Because it knows each crop's timing, it can do two things a generic app cannot. It generates accurate daily tasks, and it predicts when each tray will be ready. That second one matters a lot if you sell, because you can give customers a realistic harvest date instead of a guess. If you want a refresher on why that weighted germination step even exists, we break it down in our weight during germination experiment.

Sunflower Black Oil tray detail page in the Microgreen Tracker app showing day 3 of 8, seed sown, water used, and estimated cost

Watch: getting started with the Microgreen Tracker

The fastest way to see how it all fits together is to watch it happen. In this first tutorial, CJ walks through the getting-started flow from an empty account: adding a seed to your catalog with its supplier, cost, and inventory tracking, adding your grow medium, building a reusable tray setup, planting your first tray, logging that first watering, and adding a tray clip color so you can spot the tray at a glance. For the written version, see our step-by-step post on how to set up the Microgreen Tracker and plant your first tray.

When you add a seed, you choose how closely to track it: nothing, just the cost, or full stock. Full stock counts down every time you plant.

[IMAGE: microgreen-tracker-add-seed-inventory-broccoli | alt: Microgreen Tracker add seed inventory window with broccoli purple sprouting, sow weight, and tracking options]

Growing mediums work the same way, so soil, coco coir, or a reusable silicone grow medium can carry its own cost and stock.

[IMAGE: microgreen-tracker-add-grow-medium-happy-frog | alt: Microgreen Tracker add grow medium window showing Happy Frog soil potting mix with tracking options]

Once your seed and medium are in, planting is just a couple of taps, and the app immediately starts deducting your inventory and building an estimated tray cost. From there it tells you when to change stages and prompts every watering for the rest of the grow.

What you can do with it

Everything below is part of the complete app you get during your 7-day free trial:

Full tray lifecycle tracking, a day-by-day timeline of everything that happened to a tray from sow to harvest.
A task-first daily workflow. Your morning routine becomes a short checklist instead of a memory test, with overdue work flagged first.
A crop library of 81 crops and 286 varieties, each with sow weights, days to harvest, and phase timing built in. Override anything or add your own custom crops.
Smart scheduling and harvest projections, so you know what to do today and when each tray comes due.
Supplies and inventory tracking for seed, mediums, fertilizer, and equipment, with low-stock alerts and seed-lot traceability.
Barcode labels and scanning, a full calendar view, bulk actions, succession planting, and Grow Stats analytics.
Push notifications for watering, harvest day, and deliveries, plus a Spanish interface if you prefer it.

The inventory side is smarter than a simple list. Add your seed to Supplies, and every time you plant a tray the app deducts what you used automatically, so your on-hand estimate stays current without you touching it. Enter what that seed cost and it feeds straight into your cost numbers. It even tells you roughly how many days until a seed lot runs out, and flags low stock before it becomes a problem mid-week.

Add a new tray and the app calculates your sow weight based on the crop and tray size, so there is no math to do. You can also schedule backward from a target harvest date and let the app figure out the sow date for you. That is a real help when you are growing crops with different timelines side by side, like fast radish microgreens, steady broccoli, and sweet pea shoots. Want a steady supply? Set up succession planting and schedule several waves, a week apart, in one action.

Watering is built in too. You set your schedule, the app surfaces watering tasks when they are due, and it can push a reminder to your phone in the morning, the evening, or both. It will also remind you the evening before a tray's harvest day. If you are still dialing in how much and how often, our complete watering guide covers bottom watering, top watering, and volumes from years of testing.

Microgreen Tracker push notification on a phone reminding that 4 trays still need evening watering

Microgreen Tracker My Grows screen showing active trays with estimated harvest dates and cost per tray

You can see all of this for yourself at www.microgreentracker.com. Your 7-day free trial is the whole app, not a stripped-down demo, so you can poke around everything before the subscription begins.

For growers who sell

This is where the Microgreen Tracker goes past a grow log and becomes a way to plan real production. One thing to be clear about: the business side is a production planner, not an invoicing system. It plans exactly what you have to grow, and you invoice however you already invoice. Here is what it does:

Customers with contact details, delivery day, notes, and order history, so you can grow a tray for a specific customer and keep fulfillment traceable from seed to sale.
Orders quoted the way wholesale actually works, in pounds and ounces, moving through a clear status lifecycle from pending to delivered.
Order-driven planting plans. Every crop on an order counts back from one shared harvest date, so a 12-day crop gets sown before an 8-day crop and both are ready the same morning. One button hands the whole staged batch to Add Tray, pre-filled.
Recurring and standing orders on a weekly or every-few-weeks cadence, generated automatically ahead of their sow window so a regular delivery is never a scramble.

There is also true cost-per-tray tracking that almost no grower does by hand. It breaks each tray down into five parts: seed, growing medium, fertilizer, electricity, and overhead. It handles the parts most people skip, like energy costing by wattage and runtime, fertilizer costing from your dilution rate (tell it once and every tray is costed from then on), and spreading a reusable silicone grow medium cost across every grow it serves. Add what it costs to be in business, like rent, insurance, or a market stall, and that is spread across your planned trays too. Grow Stats, cost analytics, and CSV or Excel export are all included in your trial, so you can see your real numbers before you ever decide to stay.

If selling is your goal, pair the app with our guide on how to sell microgreens and our breakdown of the best microgreens for restaurants. For a sense of how efficient this crop really is, our microgreens vs. mature vegetables comparison is worth a read.

Grow Stats cost analysis in the Microgreen Tracker app showing average cost per tray, cost per gram, and supply inventory value

Who it's for

From growing a single tray to thousands, this app was designed for every kind of grower.

Home growers who want to never forget to water and always know exactly when to harvest, without keeping it all in their head. Keep It Simple was made for you.
Side-hustle and market growers ready to track supply costs, plan production from their order book, and set up standing weekly deliveries.
Commercial farms bringing grow tracking, customers, orders, planting plans, and cost per tray into one place, with a team on shared accounts and room for up to 2,500 active trays.

If you grow at home, do not skip past the tracking and cost tools thinking they are only for sellers. One of the most satisfying things you can do is finally see what a tray of microgreens actually costs you to grow. The app adds up your seed, medium, and even the electricity your lights use, and gives you a real cost per tray. Put that next to what a grocery store charges for a tiny clamshell of the same greens, and you can see in plain numbers how much you are saving by growing your own. For a lot of home growers, that single number is the moment it clicks.

The data pays off in the grow itself, too. Because every watering, stage change, and harvest weight is logged, you build a personal record of what actually works in your space. You can look back and see that your radish came in heavier the time you sowed a little lighter, or that a crop did better with an extra day in blackout. It turns growing at home from guesswork into something you steadily get better at.

And the bigger you grow, the more the bulk actions earn their keep. Water, plant, harvest, or change the stage of many trays at once, even across different stages, and log a whole shelf in seconds instead of tapping through it tray by tray. Print barcode labels, scan a shelf into a selection, and handle hundreds of trays genuinely fast.

Microgreen Tracker dashboard showing weighted and in-light trays with ready to harvest flags beside microgreens

Want to go even deeper on learning how to grow microgreens? Our Microgreen Masterclass walks through every growing method and the business side from A to Z, and it pairs naturally with the Tracker.

Microgreen Tracker Grow Stats harvest performance showing radish yield, cost per tray, and A grade quality

What growers are saying

"The app is great! Just subscribed today and super excited to keep track on the app and get rid of all my pieces of paper! Thank you!"

Niki A.

"The app is very easy to use plus I enjoy clean look that it has."

One grower

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Microgreen Tracker free?

It is a subscription, and every new grower starts with a 7-day free trial of the complete app, including customers, orders, Grow Stats, cost analytics, export, barcodes, and push notifications. You pick a plan on the last screen of setup, nothing is charged until the seven days are up, and you can cancel any time. Everything you record during the trial stays on your account. You can start at www.microgreentracker.com.

What happens when I sign up?

You create a login, then go through a short set of setup questions before you reach the dashboard. Choose Track Everything for about twenty short screens covering your units, tray sizes, mediums, seeds, recipes, feed, power, a first tray setup, and reminders, or Keep It Simple for four quick screens with Simple Mode on. Setup ends on the plan screen, where you choose a plan and start your 7-day free trial.

How do I get started with the app?

Start your trial and finish the guided setup, then head to My Catalog to add your first seed and grow medium, choosing whether to track just the name, the cost, or full inventory. Plant your first tray and log your first watering. Our getting-started video above walks through the whole flow from an empty account in a few minutes.

Is it worth using if I only grow for myself at home?

Yes. Beyond never forgetting a watering or a harvest date, the cost tools show you what each tray costs to grow, including electricity, so you can compare it to buying microgreens at the store. Every watering and harvest is also logged, so you build a personal record of what works best in your space. And if you want it minimal, Simple Mode keeps it to the basics.

What if I just want something simple?

Choose Keep It Simple during setup, or turn on Simple Mode any time. It reduces everything to Home, My Grows, and Plant, shows each crop's stage and harvest date, and hides grams, costs, and ratios. It is a per-person setting and fully reversible, so on a shared account one person can keep it simple while another uses the full toolkit on the same trays.

Do I have to know how much seed to use for each tray?

No. The app comes preloaded with suggested sow weights, phase timing, and days to harvest for all 81 crops and 286 varieties. Sow density is stored per square inch, so it scales the amount to whatever tray size you pick, from a 10x20 down to a 5x5 or a custom size. Every number is a starting point you can override to match your own conditions.

Can I customize the growing stages and watering?

Yes. You can set how many times a day you water, adjust weighted and blackout timing, change days to harvest, and pick whether a tray uses full guided tasks, water or stage reminders only, or quiet recordkeeping. You can change these globally for a crop or just for a single tray.

Does it track my seed and supplies?

Yes. Add your seed, mediums, fertilizer, and equipment to Supplies, and planting a tray automatically deducts the seed you used, so your on-hand estimate stays current. Add costs and they feed your cost-per-tray numbers, with low-stock alerts and an estimate of how many days until a lot runs out.

Do I need to download anything?

No. It is a responsive web app that works in any phone, tablet, or desktop browser, and you can install it to your home screen for one-tap access. There is no app store involved.

Does it send me reminders?

Yes. It sends web push notifications for watering (morning and evening), the evening before a harvest day, and the morning an order is due for delivery, at times you choose. They land on your phone as push notifications, so there are no emails or texts.

Can I use it for my microgreen business?

Yes. You get customers, orders, and order-driven planting plans that tell you exactly what to sow and when so several crops are ready on the same day. It plans your production. It does not handle invoicing or payments, so you invoice however you already do.

Can I track many trays at once?

Yes. Bulk actions let you water, plant, harvest, or change the stage of many trays at once, even across different stages. You can also print barcode labels and scan trays to build a selection fast. The plans scale in tray capacity, up to 2,500 active trays.

Is it available in Spanish?

The app interface is available in English and Spanish as a simple user setting. The in-app guides, FAQ, tours, guided setup, and push notifications are English only.

Ready to take the guesswork out of your grow?

The Microgreen Tracker is the tool we always wished we had, built from real years in a real grow space. Whether you are growing your first tray or planning a week of deliveries, it keeps every tray on track and tells you exactly what to do today. Answer a few setup questions, and the app is ready to grow before you even get in. Start My Free 7-Day Trial and see it for yourself at www.microgreentracker.com.

Microgreen Tracker dashboard on a phone standing between trays of microgreens showing the day's watering tasks

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The Microgreen Tracker is a separate product with its own website at www.microgreentracker.com. All accounts, subscriptions, billing, and support for the app are handled there, not through our main store at www.onthegrow.net. You cannot start, change, or cancel a Microgreen Tracker subscription from onthegrow.net.

The information in this blog is based on our personal experience and is for educational purposes only. Cost per tray and savings versus store-bought microgreens depend on your own seed, medium, electricity, and supplies, so your numbers will differ from ours. Local food safety, licensing, and business requirements vary by location. Always verify current rules with your local health department and department of agriculture before selling.

— On The Grow®, LLC

Happy growing!