Kickstarter launches Fall 2026 — $59 for the first 200 backers

Grow lion’s mane in complete silence.

Under 18dB. Two-minute setup. First harvest in 25 days. The Sh-Room Solo fits on a kitchen counter and runs quieter than a library. Refills are a $30–40 sterile bag, or a few dollars if you DIY.

$59first 200 backers$79 retail·78% recycled materials

Reserving is free and holds your $59 first-200 price. No card, no charge until the campaign goes live.

Compare backer tiers ↓Plan your first grow →
<18dB silent
2-Min Setup
78% Recycled
Sh-Room Solo on a kitchen counter with mushrooms growing inside
Temperature
75°F Auto
The Technology

Two-way thermal control.
Solid-state. Silent.

Growing mushrooms is really a temperature problem: warm to colonize, cool to fruit. The travel coolers do it with a thermoelectric chip that heats or cools by reversing its current. We bring that same solid-state control to your counter — no compressor, nothing to hear.

APEX: thermoelectric + heat + fan + camcontainedgrow bagRecycled shellCoir + EVA insulationESP32-CAM

Colonization — warm

Every Sh-Room heats and holds 65–75°F while the mycelium claims the block, humidifies to 90%+, and keeps air moving. This is the base unit, fully.

Fruiting — cool (Pro)

Cool-loving species — shiitake, maitake, blue oyster — fruit at 55–65°F, below a warm kitchen. The Pro's thermoelectric module drives the chamber down and holds it there; it even delivers the cold-shock that triggers pinning. The base unit heats only, so pair it with a cool room for these species.

The loop

The camera watches, the controller holds the setpoint, the app reads the flush on-device and tells you the one thing to do next. Set it and grow.

Thermal core

Base heats · Pro cools

A W1209 controller + 12W infrared film hold colonization warmth on every unit. The Pro adds a thermoelectric (Peltier) module — the same solid-state part in those travel coolers — that flips polarity to actively cool for fruiting. No compressor, no refrigerant, no noise.

Check your room's window →

Sensing & intelligence

On-device, private

A built-in ESP32-CAM watches the flush. The companion app reads it with Apple's on-device model and coaches you to the harvest window — a call, a thing to watch, a reflection. Nothing leaves your phone.

How the coach works →

Honest build

Off-the-shelf · 78% recycled

Every part is a standard component you can replace with a screwdriver — controller, fan, heating film, LED, camera. No proprietary anything, so it scales with any contract manufacturer and never needs to be shipped back to be fixed.

Full specifications →

Honest scope: the base Sh-Room heats, humidifies, and circulates air — it does not refrigerate below room temperature. Two-way thermoelectric cooling is the Sh-Room Pro, our headline stretch goal. We'd rather name exactly what each unit does than show you a spec it can't hit.

Bag to plate in 25 days

Watch a grow, day by day.

Drag the slider to scrub through a full cycle — from the day you plug in to the day you harvest. No green thumb required.

Day 0
Inoculation
Plug inHarvest · day 25

What's happening

Day 0. You drop a colonized grow bag into the precision sleeve and plug in the single 12V adapter. The Smart Spine holds 75°F automatically.

Your job: Two-minute setup. Then leave it alone.

Grow your first flush →

25 days, day by day

  1. Inoculation
    Day 0–1
  2. Colonization
    Day 1–14
  3. Pinning
    Day 14–18
  4. Fruiting
    Day 18–25
  5. Harvest
    Day 25

Full specifications.

Every component is off-the-shelf and user-replaceable with a screwdriver. No proprietary parts. No planned obsolescence.

Sh-Room dimensions comparison showing compact footprint next to phone and toaster
Compact Footprint
Sh-Room engineering drawings with front, side, and top views
Engineering Drawings
All Sh-Room electronic components laid out
All Components

Dimensions

Exterior7.5" W x 6.5" D x 17" H
Interior5.5" W x 4.5" D x 15" H
Wall Thickness1" (25mm)
Weight3.5 lbs (1.6 kg)
Footprint48.75 sq in

Grow Chamber

Bag Capacity1x standard 5lb (6L)
Fit TypeZero-gap precision sleeve
Chamber RH85-95% (fruiting)
Target Temp75°F / 24°C
CO2 Target<1,000 ppm

Materials

Shell600D recycled polyester
InsulationCoconut coir R-3.5
LinerFood-safe TPU (FDA)
ColorVera Green #9CAF88
Recycled Content78%

Electronics

ControllerW1209 (0.1°C resolution)
Heater12W IR polyimide film
Fan40mm Noctua (<18dB)
Lighting3000K LED (>200 lux)
CameraESP32-CAM 2MP WiFi

Power & Safety

Input100-240V AC worldwide
Output12V DC, 2A (24W)
System Draw1.8A max all loads
Thermal Fuse72°C non-resettable
Wiring22AWG silicone 200°C

Usability

Assembly<2 min, no tools
Noise<18 dB(A)
Liner Wash50+ machine cycles
Parts100% user-replaceable
ConnectorsJST-XH keyed (anti-reverse)
Sh-Room Solo complete annotated specifications
The honest math

What growing actually costs.

We're not going to pretend a $79 box pays for itself in mushrooms. A sterile, ready-to-grow bag runs $30–40. Do it yourself with bulk substrate and it's a few dollars — but that's real work. Here's the real number, both ways.

How long are you growing?

How are you refilling?

Total spend — 14 grows

Sh-Room
$569
Competitor kits
$420
Store-bought
$252

14 grows × 1 lb yield per flush (conservative). Gourmet species run $14–24/lb where sold fresh at all; $18/lb used here. Single-use competitor kits ~$30 (grow once, discard). Sh-Room: $79 hardware (reused for years) + $35 sterile ready-to-grow bag per grow.

Cost per pound

Sh-Room$40.64/lb
Competitor kits$30.00/lb
Grocery store$18.00/lb

The honest verdict

At $35 a sterile bag, growing costs about the same as buying gourmet mushrooms — you don't do it to save money. You do it for mushrooms picked minutes ago, and for species (lion's mane, exotic oysters) you often can't buy fresh at any price.

Reserve backer pricing (from $59) →

Estimates only. Retail mushroom prices sourced from USDA AMS specialty crop reports and verified at major grocery retailers. Competitor kit prices verified at North Spore, Back to the Roots, and Fungi Perfecti retail sites. Yield assumes one pound per flush (conservative biological efficiency estimate). Actual results vary.

First Flush Friday

We grow food. We also cover the whole fungal kingdom — honestly.

A weekly letter about growing mushrooms at home: species guides, harvest stories, the science at the edges of what fungi can do — and what tending something alive on its own schedule teaches you about being alive. Free, every Friday.

#008Science

The Mushroom Left the Mushroom

Bioengineers just brewed psilocybin in bacteria — grams per liter, no fruiting body at all. What it means that a molecule fungi spent 100 million years perfecting now pours out of a fermenter, and what's gained and lost when the mushroom leaves the mushroom.

Read issue →
#007Engineering

The Incubator Is Silent. Your iPhone Does the Talking.

Why we're building the grow coach on Apple's on-device model instead of the cloud: your harvest call, your one thing to watch, and your daily reflection — computed on your phone, never leaving it, free forever.

Read issue →
#006Contemplation

Remember, You're Going to Die (Your Mushrooms Already Know)

Fungi are the only kingdom whose entire job is turning death back into life. Growing them on your counter is a quiet daily lesson in impermanence — and why that's good news.

Read issue →
Read the archive and subscribe
Beyond Gourmet

Food is medicine.
Mushrooms are proof.

The same species you grow in your Sh-Room are among the most studied functional foods on earth. From nerve regeneration to immune defense, the research is decades deep.

Lion's Mane
Hericium erinaceus

Nerve growth factor stimulation. Studied for cognitive support, memory, and neuroprotection.

Published in Journal of Medicinal Food, International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Turkey Tail
Trametes versicolor

Immune modulation via polysaccharide-K (PSK). FDA-approved as adjunct cancer therapy in Japan since 1977.

NIH-funded Phase I clinical trial at Bastyr University

Reishi
Ganoderma lucidum

Adaptogenic stress response. Studied for sleep quality, immune support, and cardiovascular health.

Published in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

Oyster
Pleurotus ostreatus

High in lovastatin (natural cholesterol management), ergothioneine (cellular antioxidant), and beta-glucans.

Published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

Peer-Reviewed Research

Mushrooms and end-of-life anxiety.

Landmark studies at Johns Hopkins and NYU found that psilocybin-assisted therapy produced rapid, substantial, and sustained decreases in anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer diagnoses. 80% of participants showed clinically significant reductions in distress -- effects that persisted at 6-month follow-up.

Colorado's Proposition 122 (Natural Medicine Health Act, 2023) created a regulated framework for therapeutic access. Oregon followed. The FDA has granted Breakthrough Therapy designation for psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression.

Griffiths et al., Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016. Ross et al., Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016. FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation, 2018.

80%
clinically significant reduction in anxiety
6 mo+
sustained therapeutic benefit
3
states with regulated therapeutic access

From your kitchen to your care plan.

Growing mushrooms is where many families first encounter functional food as medicine. For families navigating aging, chronic illness, or end-of-life planning, that journey continues with tools designed to support the whole person.

Start the conversation.

CareGoals turns the advance care planning conversation families avoid into the one they're grateful they had. Talk first. Documents follow.

caregoals.com →

Get your ComfortCard.

Your care identity, emergency access, and HSA/FSA payment in one card. Save 28-36% on care costs through pre-tax dollars. Build cooperative equity with every transaction.

comfortcard.org →

Find a licensed facilitator.

Althea connects individuals with licensed psilocybin facilitators and healing centers in Oregon and Colorado. Legal, guided, evidence-based therapeutic access.

withalthea.com →

Care that's owned, not rented.

Worker-owned home care where caregivers earn $25-28/hr with equity, families save 30%, and the whole system is structurally immune to private equity acquisition.

co-op.care →

Sh-Room is a gourmet mushroom growing product. It is not a medical device and does not make health claims. The research cited above is for informational purposes. Consult a healthcare provider for medical advice. Cultivation of regulated species must comply with all applicable laws.

More Than a Product

The Sh-Room Ecosystem.

A mushroom isn't a solo organism. It's a network. So is the Sh-Room community -- a living system of growers, sharers, and neighbors building local food resilience one flush at a time.

Grow
Drop in a bag,
harvest in 25 days
Share
Clean, log,
pass to neighbor
Multiply
Chapters grow,
the network compounds
50+
wash cycles per liner
78%
recycled materials
100%
repairable parts
∞
grow cycles per unit

Harvest Circle

Share the unit, not the cost

Grow a cycle, sanitize, pass to your neighbor. One Sh-Room serves dozens of growers indefinitely. Includes maintenance log, clean cycle protocol, and handoff checklist.

Spore Library

Community culture bank

A neighborhood-scale seed library for mushroom cultures. Check out a syringe of blue oyster, lion's mane, or shiitake. Grow it. Return a culture from your healthiest flush to keep the library alive.

Local Chapters

City by city, block by block

Starting in Boulder, CO. Each chapter runs its own Harvest Circles, Spore Library, and monthly grow meetups. Chapter leaders get early access to new species and bulk grow bag pricing.

Grow Journals

Timelapses, data, and stories

Every Sh-Room AI tier captures daily timelapse. Share your grow journey, compare colonization speeds across species, and build the largest open-source mushroom growing dataset.

Harvest Exchange

Gift fresh, never sell

Grew more lion's mane than you can eat? Post your surplus on the Harvest Exchange. Neighbor-to-neighbor gifting only -- no money changes hands. Label the species, harvest date, and storage instructions.

Species Database

Community growing guides

Crowd-sourced grow profiles for every species. Optimal temperature, humidity, fruiting triggers, expected yield, flavor notes, and recipe pairings. Ranked by community success rate.

Tool Library Partners

Check out a Sh-Room like a book

We're partnering with tool libraries and makerspaces to stock Sh-Room units for checkout. Borrow for 30 days, grow a cycle, return clean. Free to library members.

Impact Dashboard

Track what we grow together

Every harvest logged feeds a collective impact dashboard. Pounds of food grown locally, plastic packaging avoided, miles of grocery transport eliminated, and community connections made.

The Mission

Rid the world of single use.

Single-use bottles. Single-use kits that end up in the trash after one cycle. Single-use products designed to be replaced. The Sh-Room circulates forever. The substrate refills for $3. The liner washes 50+ times. One unit. Dozens of growers. One block at a time.

Join the waitlist. We'll let you know when your city's chapter launches.

From concept to reality

We got tired of noisy,
single-use grow kits.

Every home mushroom kit we tried made the same three compromises: it hummed like an appliance, it fell apart after a grow or two, and it cost more than the mushrooms it produced. So we built the one we wanted — quiet enough to forget it's there, made of parts you can replace yourself, and cheap to run for years.

Sh-Room is a small team, not a factory with a logo. We're not trying to sell you a subscription or a proprietary pod. We're trying to put a living thing on your counter and get out of the way.

Boulder, CO
Designed where we grow

Not a drop-ship relabel from a registered-agent address. Sh-Room is designed and engineered in Boulder, on the counters we actually use.

See how it works →
0 proprietary parts
Repairable with a screwdriver

W1209 controller, heating film, fan, LED strip, ESP32-CAM — every component is off-the-shelf and user-replaceable. Nothing to send back, nothing to landfill.

Full specs →
<18 dB
Quieter than a whisper

A Noctua-class fan on silicone-isolated grommets. Most home kits sound like a mini fridge; this one disappears into the room.

The grow science →
78% recycled
Built to be passed on

Insulated with upcycled coconut coir, machine-washable liner, and a Harvest Circle designed so one unit can serve a whole neighborhood.

The Harvest Circle →
How we're building this

Radically honest, including about the AI.

This entire website was designed and built by AI, working with our team. We think that's worth saying out loud rather than hiding — it's how a small team ships something this considered. Where you see a rendered concept image, it's labeled as one; the physical Sh-Room is a real prototype, and every backer update will carry real photos and real manufacturing progress, not renders dressed up as product shots.

The deal is simple: we tell you what's finished, what's in progress, and what could go wrong — before you back it, and every week after.

Back the Sh-Room on Kickstarter.

Launching Fall 2026. Retail is $79 — the first 200 backers get it for $59. Reserve your spot now: it just holds your place and your price. No card is charged until the campaign goes live.

First 200
Best price — capped

Super Early Bird

$59

First 200 backers · $20 off retail

  • 1 × Sh-Room incubator
  • Machine-washable TPU liner
  • First all-in-one grow bag
  • Digital grow guide
  • Grow-coach app when it ships (stretch)
After the first 200

Early Bird

$69

$10 off retail

  • 1 × Sh-Room incubator
  • Machine-washable TPU liner
  • First all-in-one grow bag
  • Digital grow guide
Standard single unit

Sh-Room

$79

Retail price at launch

  • 1 × Sh-Room incubator
  • Machine-washable TPU liner
  • First all-in-one grow bag
  • Digital grow guide
Two units

Harvest Circle 2-Pack

$149

Keep one, gift one

  • 2 × Sh-Room incubators
  • 2 × TPU liners + first grow bags
  • Start a neighborhood Harvest Circle
  • Digital grow guide
Four units

Grow-Together 4-Pack

$279

Best per-unit value

  • 4 × Sh-Room incubators
  • 4 × TPU liners + first grow bags
  • For families, classrooms, tool libraries
  • Digital grow guide

Reserving is free and holds your backer price — no payment is collected until the Kickstarter campaign goes live in Fall 2026. Honest about refills: a sterile ready-to-grow bag runs $30–40; DIY bulk substrate is a few dollars a grow if you inoculate it yourself.

Frequently asked questions.