The Backyard I Grew Up In, and Why I Built YardPreview

I still have a scar from that backyard. I fell there while I was learning to play baseball, and the mark never quite went away. I spent more of my childhood in that yard than anywhere else, and I always wanted to fix it up.

We could never afford to. So it stayed the same through school, through college, and through 11 years of me working away from home. Somewhere in there I became Marketing Head at a software company. The yard didn't change at all.

This year I came back for good. I had just gotten married, nobody had lived in the house for a while, and I was bringing my wife home to it. I walked out the back door and saw this:

A grey fence with one orange replacement board, ivy and shrubs taking over one side, and a lawn that was more clover and bare dirt than grass. On the cracked patio sat a rusty table, two chairs and some empty pots. Nobody had made a decision about that yard in years, and it showed.

I wanted it to be a new beginning for us. I just couldn't picture what that looked like.

I tried AI backyard design tools first#

I work at a software company, so my first stop was AI. I opened Gemini and ChatGPT, uploaded a photo, and asked for a redesign.

The first image was nice. It was also not my house. The fence had moved, the back door had shifted, and the roofline was different. When I asked for a cottage garden, I got one image. When I wanted to compare it with something modern, I had to write another prompt and wait for another single image. To see ten ideas side by side, I would have had to write ten prompts and hope each one kept the house intact. And the plants? A chatbot will happily put tropical flowers in a yard that sees a hard frost every winter. It doesn't know your climate unless you know enough to tell it, and it has no idea which corner of your yard gets full sun and which one sits in the shade of the neighbour's trees.

Then the backyard design apps#

Next I tried the online design tools: Canva's landscape plans, Planner 5D, SmartDraw. They're good products, but each one hands you a blank canvas. You measure the yard, draw the fence, drag in 3D trees and patio stones, and learn the software as you go. What I got back looked like a video game, not my backyard.

Several of them wanted a monthly subscription. I wasn't going to redesign my yard every month. I wanted to pay once.

None of these tools, AI or otherwise, said anything about where the rainwater goes, whether a new bed needs a hose line, or where the lights get their power. And I wanted to know what the patio looks like at 8 pm, because that's when we'd be sitting on it. Every design I saw was lit like noon.

The real option: a landscape designer at $4,200#

The other route was a landscape designer. HomeAdvisor and LawnStarter put the average US concept plan at about $4,200, and that's before anything gets built. My wife and I wanted to see options, argue about them a little, and settle on a direction before spending that kind of money.

Here's how the options stacked up against what I needed:

I couldn't find all of that in one place. Marketing is my day job, so before building anything I checked whether other people were stuck at the same step, looking at what they search for and what they pay. They were. A lot of homeowners can't picture their yard finished, and can't justify thousands of dollars just to see it.

So I built it.

What YardPreview does#

I'm a marketer, not a developer, so the building part was new to me. The idea was simple, though. It takes three steps:

1. Photograph your yard. One to four phone photos from where you normally stand.
2. Pick your styles and ZIP code. Modern, English cottage, xeriscape, family entertaining and a few more. Your ZIP sets your USDA hardiness zone.
3. Get your designs and plan sheet. In about ten minutes, 15 to 50 photorealistic designs of your own yard.

Getting the house to stay put was the hardest part. Early versions would quietly move a window or redraw the fence, which defeats the whole point. We added checks to catch that, and if a render still drifts, every pack includes re-do credits to fix it.

The plants are matched to your zone and to how much sun each spot gets, so everything on the list can handle where it's planted. Each plant comes with its botanical name, mature size and quantity. For each style you also get a plan sheet with a numbered top-down layout plus notes on watering, irrigation, drainage and lighting. You can also see any design at dusk, with the lights on, because that's when most people use their yards.

That plan sheet is what a landscaper can quote from. A chatbot gives you a JPEG.

It's a one-time payment, with no subscription:

Launch pricing, as of October 2026.

Our backyard before and after#

This is the design we landed on.

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BeforeOur design

Here's what changed from the before photo:

Look at the edges, though. It's the same fence, the same sliding door, the same AC unit and the same trees behind the house. It's our yard, just finished.

And this is the same design at dusk:

And this is the plan view that came with it, which is what we'll hand to the landscaper. Every numbered plant is on the list with its quantity, the lights are marked, and the irrigation note says how many drip emitters and spray heads to budget for:

The aim was never to replace the landscape designer. It was to walk in knowing what we wanted.

We're building it now#

That render is our plan, and we're building it now, one piece at a time. When it's done, I'll stand by the fence where I took that first photo and take another one from the same spot, and I'll share it here.

The kid who fell in this yard learning baseball wanted it to look different for a long time. It took me a while to get back, and I'm glad the yard was still here when I did.