Rainforest.land Review

How we rated Rainforest.land

Rainforest.land is a service rather than a piece of software: the planting happens in Madagascar, Kenya and Nepal, and what a subscriber ever sees is a plan, a project page and a running total. The five scores below are built from what the site publishes about its projects, the partners who do the work and the billing behind the subscription, and none of them comes from a planting site, since none was visited. Verification carries the most weight of the five, because a buyer is paying for work carried out somewhere they will never stand, and the only thing that makes that safe is a clear account of what was planted and where. The pages these figures came from, and the dates they were read, sit in the Sources block that closes the article.

Verification and impact reporting

The headline figures are public: 70,128 trees planted, 28,051 kg of CO₂ recorded and 1,240 people supported, each shown against a goal of a million trees, half a million kilograms and ten thousand people. Behind those counters the site describes a dashboard carrying planting updates, photographs from the sites, GPS coordinates, survival rates and growth metrics per project, and it says it runs annual audits and site visits to check the planting. The checking is described in the first person throughout: the account of what was planted is one the vendor compiles.

What the numbers can carry is set out by the site itself. Its own questions say plainly that planting here is not a certified carbon offset and cannot be claimed as a verified credit, and the terms describe the tree count as an estimate built from the partner’s cost per tree, with no guarantee of survival or of a particular environmental outcome. On the account side, a subscriber’s tree count and first name (or a company’s name) can appear on a public leaderboard by default, with settings to change that, no contact details shared, and deletion of an account leaving only anonymised statistics.

4.2, a mark set by who runs the checks rather than by how many of them there are: the counters, the updates and the audit language all come from the vendor, with no outside body named against the planting.

Projects and planting partners

Projects in six countries, twelve or more in all, sit behind the subscription, each with a page of its own and a price per tree: Madagascar at $1.20 across 46 sites, Kenya at $1.50 across 26, Nepal at $1.35 across 21, the Philippines at $1.40 across five, Ethiopia at $1.25 across two and Brazil at $1.80 across two. The larger three carry the figures a buyer would want to see, with 42,800 hectares and 3,480 people employed in Madagascar, 46,325 hectares and 850 people in Kenya and 6,625 hectares and 190 people in Nepal. Species are chosen as natives for each region, from mangroves on the coast to agroforestry on farmland.

Who does the work is named rather than implied. The home page credits Eden Reforestation Projects and, more generally, the reforestation partners the site supports, and the terms are explicit that the planting is performed by the Tree Planting Partners and not by Rainforest.land directly. That division is what makes the project page the place where the money can be traced, since the company’s own part is the financing and the reporting rather than the planting. It also means the hectare and employment figures on each page are the partner’s numbers, carried through the platform.

4.5, high because the projects, the partners and the price of a tree are named and published one by one rather than rolled into a single aggregate claim.

Price and value

Three individual plans carry the subscription. Seedling is $7.99 a month for three trees, which comes to 36 trees a year at $2.66 each; Garden is $10.99 for five, or 60 trees at $2.20; and Rainforest is $19.99 for ten, or 120 trees at $2.00. Each plan can be paid monthly or yearly, and the yearly option carries its own saving on the card, 11% on Seedling, 26% on Garden and 33% on Rainforest. A reader who wants a number the plans do not offer can ask for a custom amount. Teams are priced per head instead, at $5 per employee a month on Starter and $10 on Growth, with an enterprise rate on request.

The marketplace prices the same trees to a different figure. A one-off contribution runs from $1.20 to $1.80 a tree depending on the project, which makes a plan the dearer way to buy a single tree, and what the extra covers is the arrangement around it: a monthly flow that runs on its own, a running total and the tracking that comes with an account. Read as a value question, the cheapest tree per dollar is bought in the marketplace and planted once; the plans sell the habit.

4.3, since every rate is published and checkable, with the subscription priced above the one-off rate rather than below it.

Terms, billing and refunds

A plan carries on by itself unless it is stopped, and the account settings hold a switch to stop it whenever the subscriber likes, with the rest of the billing period still served. Refunds run to thirty days, measured from the most recent billing date on a monthly plan and from the purchase or renewal date on a yearly one, and only the most recent payment is returned, with no prorated refund for a period left half-used. One-off payments are refundable on the same thirty-day terms. The money goes back by the original payment method within five to ten business days, and any fee charged by the processor is not returned. Stripe handles the payments, and a price change has to be notified before it takes effect.

Two clauses are worth reading before the first payment rather than after it. Disputes go to binding arbitration in Wyoming and on an individual basis, which takes them out of the courts a reader might otherwise use, and liability is capped at the amount paid in the twelve months before a claim. The commitment is recurring and ends only when it is cancelled, which suits a reader who wants the habit running quietly in the background, and asks more of a reader who would rather decide once.

4.0, held down by the renewal and the arbitration clause rather than by the refund window, which is a genuine thirty days.

Business and team planting

The business side is priced by the head rather than by the account. Starter is $5 an employee a month for up to 50 people and includes the impact dashboard, monthly reports and email support; Growth is $10 for up to 200 and adds advanced analytics, team leaderboards and a choice of planting locations; Enterprise is quoted on request with unlimited employees, custom reporting, a dedicated manager and API access. Employees are onboarded by invitation, with single sign-on available, and every tier includes personalised accounts so a team member can follow their own impact. Trees are spread across the active projects by default, and an enterprise customer can direct them to chosen projects or regions. Non-profits can ask for special pricing through the sales team.

The pitch is that sustainability reporting becomes a per-employee line rather than a lump sum, and the dashboard is built to be downloaded for an ESG disclosure, with carbon metrics and planting data in the same place. What does not change with the tier is the footing underneath the numbers: the impact a company reports upward is the impact the platform reports to it, so the verification question hanging over the individual plans follows the business ones as well.

4.4, for pricing team planting per head and naming what each tier carries, on the same verification footing as the rest.