Carrying plants costs coins per hour. Your team holds eight, the top slots ride free, and everything below them is billed — so what you pay is decided by how you arrange your team.
Every plant you own is either carried — on your team, able to battle, costing upkeep — or stored in your greenhouse, where it is free forever but cannot fight. Storing one also restores its HP and Sun to full instantly, so the greenhouse is both the place you park what you are not using and the fastest way to refresh a drained plant.
You can carry eight plants at any trainer level. The cap is flat and never grows; levelling buys you a higher growth gate, not a bigger team. The one way past eight is a Rooting Hormone catch, which forces the plant onto your team even when it is full.
Past eight, only your top eight in team order are fielded in a battle. A plant held over the cap sits out and still costs upkeep — but it is not stranded. Drag it up the Team sheet and it fields, at the cost of dropping whoever it displaced. An over-cap plant is a reserve you pay to keep on hand, and which of your plants sits out is always your choice.
Your team is an ordered list, and you set that order by dragging on the Team sheet. Upkeep reads the order directly: slots 1..N are free, and every slot below them is charged.
N starts at the full eight and drops by one every ten trainer levels, down to a floor of one:
| Trainer level | Free slots | Charged slots |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 | 8 | none |
| 11–20 | 7 | 8 |
| 21–30 | 6 | 7–8 |
| 31–40 | 5 | 6–8 |
| 41–50 | 4 | 5–8 |
| 51–60 | 3 | 4–8 |
| 61–70 | 2 | 3–8 |
| 71+ | 1 | 2–8 |
So your first ten trainer levels are free for a normal team of eight, and the charged set then grows one slot per decade, climbing from the bottom of the list upward. The exception is the one above: a Rooting Hormone catch can put a ninth plant on your team at any level, and there is no ninth free slot for it to ride, so it is charged even at trainer level 1.
The rate is the average level of the plants sitting in your charged slots, in coins per hour. An average, not a total — so the bill never exceeds the level of your strongest charged plant, however many slots are charged.
Because it reads slot positions and not levels, the same eight plants can cost very different amounts depending only on their order. Take a team running L10 through L80 at trainer level 31, where slots 6–8 are charged. Put your three biggest plants at the bottom of the list and those slots hold L60, L70 and L80 — 70 coins an hour. Move them to the top and the same three charged slots hold L30, L20 and L10 — 20 an hour, for exactly the same team.
That is the lever. Upkeep is charged on the plants you rank lowest, so ordering your team is an economic decision as much as a battle-order one.
Where a new catch lands depends on whether you have ever dragged your team. A plant you have not placed by hand sorts below every plant you have, and above every plant you have not — most recent first. So on a team you have never reordered, your newest catch takes slot 1 and pushes your oldest plant down into a charged slot; on a team you have fully arranged, it lands at the bottom and is charged itself. Anything that counts as keeping a plant, not just dragging, moves it up that un-arranged order.
Upkeep accrues continuously and settles when you next load the game, so a long absence arrives as a single lump rather than a trickle.
Coins in your Vault are safe. Upkeep only ever draws from your spendable wallet and never touches banked coins — that is what the bank is for.
A plant away on a drop is not billed. Send one out with a Walkie-Talkie and it keeps its carry slot reserved, so a new catch cannot take its place while it is gone — but it is not home, so it does not count toward the rate. Your carried count can therefore be higher than the number of plants you are actually paying for. It is also skipped when the free slots are counted out, so while a plant is away the plant below it on the Team sheet moves up a slot for billing purposes.
If the bill lands and your wallet cannot cover it, upkeep takes what is there and moves everything below your free slots into the greenhouse. The plants riding your free slots stay. The same first-N-slots rule that decides who pays decides who survives.
Benched plants are healed to full on the way in, and because every survivor is sitting in a free slot the rate afterwards is zero — so this happens once, not again on the next load. Nothing is lost: the whole team is in your greenhouse, ready to bring back when you can afford it.