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While many have extolled the potential impacts of digital advisory services for smallholder agriculture, the evidence for sustained uptake of such tools remains limited. This paper utilizes a survey of tool developers and researchers, as well as a systematic meta-analysis of prior studies, to assess the extent and challenges of scaling decision support tools for site-specific soil nutrient management (SSNM-DST) across smallholder farming systems, where “scaling” is defined as a significant increase in tool usage beyond pilot levels. Our evaluation draws on relevant literature, expert opinion and apps available in different repositories. Despite their acclaimed yield benefits, we find that SSNM-DST have struggled to reach scale over the last few decades and, with strong heterogeneity in adoption among intended stakeholders and tools. For example, the log odds of a SSNM-DST reaching 5–10 % of the target farmers …