Why we built this

Four generations, one parampara

Acharya Sanjay Sharma's great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all pandits. People came to their house at hours when other houses were asleep — a man in a shawl at five in the morning, a whole family on a Tuesday afternoon, somebody's uncle who wouldn't say what was actually wrong until the third cup of tea. They sat on the floor of the front room, and nobody was ever asked for money. Not once, in three generations.

So in that house the knowledge was never taught. It was overheard — the way you learn your mother’s voice, years before you notice you are learning. Sanjay has carried it for eighteen years, and has read more than ten thousand charts.

He will not tell you any of that himself. Ask him how many people he has seen and he says “kaafi” — a fair few. The number above is ours, counted from his registers.

The argument

Tarun writes software. He also learned Vedic astrology properly — in part to settle an argument he had been having with himself for years, growing up in a family where this was simply what the elders did.

He expected to come out the other side knowing that the problem was astrology. What he found was that the problem was the internet’s version of it.

What is actually wrong with astrology online

Different sites hand you a different chart

Put one birth date, time and place into several free kundli generators and the answers disagree. Not in interpretation — in the positions of the planets. There are three ordinary reasons, and not one of them is disclosed to you. Tools differ on which ayanamsa they apply, and Lahiri and Krishnamurti sit about twenty-two arcminutes apart. They differ on whether Rahu and Ketu are taken as mean or true. And some free generators compute planetary positions from simplified mean orbital elements rather than from a full ephemeris.

A few arcminutes is enough to carry a planet across a nakshatra boundary. The Moon was in exactly one place on the morning you were born. If two sites disagree about where, one of them is simply wrong — and people decide their children’s marriages on that answer.

The billing is built to keep you talking

Most consultations online are sold by the minute, somewhere between Rs 15 and Rs 200 of it. Think about what that pays for. Nobody on a meter is rewarded for answering you in four minutes and letting you go. The reviews of the big platforms are full of people describing the timer running through the pauses, and a rate that was one figure in the listing and another once the call connected. One platform charges by the minute and, in the same terms of service, disclaims any responsibility for whether the reading turns out to be right.

We do not sell minutes. A session here is fifteen, thirty or sixty minutes, and you know the whole price before it starts. If your answer takes nine minutes, you have not lost anything by it, and neither has the Acharya.

You usually cannot tell who you are talking to

A first name. A star rating. A list of languages. No lineage, no teacher, no credential you could check even if you wanted to.

And often the remedy is the real business

On the largest Indian astrology platform, the gemstone and remedy store alone is reported at roughly Rs 140 crore a year — larger by itself than the entire revenue of its nearest listed competitor. Where the stone is the product, the reading is only the way in.

So we built it the other way round

Tarun took the problem to his brother Ankit, who writes code for a living and is hard to convince of anything — which made him exactly the right person to build it. The brief was not “an astrology app”. It was: arithmetic you can check.

We declare the ayanamsa on every chart, and you can change it — Lahiri, Raman or Krishnamurti. Planetary positions come from a real ephemeris, not from averaged orbital elements. Your chart is drawn in your own browser, so your birth details stay on your device unless you choose to save or download the report. And every acharya on this site is named, with a real profile, because you should know whose judgement you are getting.

One example of what “checked” means, because it is the kind of thing nobody advertises. Indian Standard Time was not always what it is now. Before it was settled, your city ran on its own local mean time — Kolkata was five hours, twenty-one minutes and ten seconds ahead of Greenwich, not five and a half. And from 1942 to 1945 India kept war time, an hour further ahead again. Enter a 1943 birth on most sites and the clock is treated as plain IST, which is a full hour out — easily enough to move the ascendant into the wrong sign and change the whole reading. We take the offset that was actually in force at your birth, in your city, to the minute.

That line is the whole site, really. Almost nobody arrives asking what the future holds. They arrive having been told their trouble is bad luck, or their own fault, or permanent — and it is almost never permanent. It has a shape: a start, a run, and an end. Those three things sit in a chart as dates, the way the monsoon sits in the calendar. Knowing the date does not stop the rain. It stops you believing the sky is broken.

What we will not claim

A chart is not a wish. It is a map, and some roads on it are hard. Nobody here will promise you an outcome — not a marriage, not a child, not a cure. If anyone in this field promises you one, that is the moment to stop listening. To them, and to us.