A sprinkler controller should be the most boring thing you own. It hangs in the garage, opens the valves at the right time, and you forget it's there. For the last decade, much of the industry has worked hard to make it interesting instead, mostly in ways that help someone other than the owner.
How a timer became a business model
The first smart controllers were a real step forward. Connect a timer to the weather and it can skip watering after a storm. Then the business model arrived.
Setting up the controller needed an account. The account needed an app. The app wanted your location, your contacts and permission to run in the background. Features that came in the box moved behind a monthly fee. And when the servers had an outage, or the company was sold, a box on your garage wall quietly stopped doing its job.
There's a word for this. Enshittification is what happens when a product you already paid for gets worse so someone else can make more money from it. Smart irrigation has seen every version of it.
What we believe
We started Verdant because we think a controller should do its whole job on its own, for as long as you own it. That belief became five promises, and we built the product around them, not the other way around.
- Watering is free, forever. Every zone, every program, with no subscription and no account. Paid plans add tools for professionals. None of them unlock watering, and none ever will.
- No app, no data harvesting. You set up and run Verdant without installing a phone app. The controller's location goes only to the data services it needs, such as weather and soil data, and never to us. There's nothing about you for us to collect, sell or leak.
- It works without the internet. Every watering decision is made on the controller itself. If your Wi-Fi drops, it keeps watering correctly. If a weather service goes down, it switches to another of its six sources.
- The deal never changes. What your controller does on the day you buy it, it keeps doing. We will never move a feature you rely on behind a new fee.
- It outlives us. Our firmware is held in escrow. If Verdant ever goes away, your controller is guaranteed to be unlocked so it keeps working without us. That promise is in writing from the day you buy it.
How we keep the lights on
It's a fair question. If watering is free forever and there's no app to sell ads in, how does Verdant make money?
Two ways. We sell controllers, and we offer optional plans for the people who manage irrigation for a living: alerts, cloud backup and history, fleet tools, and savings reports across many sites. Those are real tools for real work, and we charge for them. Your lawn doesn't need any of them to get watered.
That's also why we sell through installers rather than online. A controller is only as good as its setup. An installer who knows the valves, heads and soil on a property will get more out of Verdant on the first day than any setup wizard could, and they'll be there when something needs attention.
Why it matters: water
The pledge is about trust. The point is water.
Most landscapes are still watered on a clock. The clock doesn't know whether it rained yesterday, what kind of soil is under the grass, or how fast each sprinkler head puts water down. Verdant works out what each zone needs from real data for its exact location, then waters that much and no more.
We tested three Verdant controllers on real valves in Stephens City, VA; Dallas, TX; and League City, TX. They used about half the water their old clock schedules would have: 19,928 gallons, against 41,259.
What's next here
Over the coming weeks we'll go deeper on how Verdant decides what your yard needs, one feature at a time. We'll cover where the soil data comes from, why the controller calculates its own sunrise, why the type of sprinkler head matters more than you'd think, and what happens when a weather service goes down.
If there's something you'd like us to cover, let us know.
The Verdant team