The refusal list

Our price list has no line for a stone.

No line for a yantra (यन्त्र), no line for a puja, and no line that pays us when somebody else sells you one. No link in any post carries a code that earns us a share of what you buy. Both absences are real today, and both cost us nothing: there is no remedy business here to close and no affiliate income to give up.

That is the reason to write them down now, while they are free. An absence is hard to audit. Nobody can check a thing that is not there, and if one of these lines ever appears, it will appear for a reason that sounded sensible in the room.

Take the first one in full, because it sets the pattern.

We take no commission on a remedy: no gemstone, no yantra, no ritual performed on your behalf, no share of anyone else's sale of those things. The pressure is not the sale, it is the split. A commission is invisible from where the buyer stands. You see one price for an object, and you cannot see how much of it is really payment for the sentence that told you to buy it. So you cannot weigh the advice, and the person deciding whether you need the object is paid more when the answer is yes. Instead: the reading is the product, priced on its own, and nothing sold afterwards pays us.

Three parts, and every entry below has the same three. What we will not do. The pressure that would push us into it anyway. What we do instead. The middle part is the one that matters. A refusal with no pressure named against it is a preference, and preferences get revised in bad months.

Money we will not take

We take no affiliate revenue. An affiliate link pays the publisher a small amount when the reader buys. Indian guidance has required a paid connection of this kind to be disclosed since January 2023, and disclosure labels an incentive without removing it. A publisher paid on purchases drifts toward whatever produces purchases, and here that is writing which worries people. Instead, when we name a book, the link goes to the book and nothing comes back to us.

No practitioner buys a position in any list we publish. A purchasable position turns a ranking into a report on advertising budgets, and from outside it still looks like a ranking. The reader cannot tell the difference, which is the whole value of selling it. Instead, we publish the conditions for being listed and the reasons people are turned away.

We do not sell your details, and we take no fee for handing you to a practitioner. Once introductions are the revenue, the company's real job becomes collecting worried people and passing them along, because worry is what makes an introduction valuable. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 requires consent to be specific and tied to a stated purpose. Our rule is narrower. What you give us is for the reading you asked for.

We will not charge you to be told that something is wrong. The arithmetic is plain. Attach the fee to finding a doṣa (दोष), a fault read in a chart, and revenue rises with the number of faults found. Nobody has to lie for that to happen. It is enough to look a little harder for faults than for their absence, year after year. Instead, a claim check answers a different question: which text the claim comes from, if any, and what weight it carries there. "This does not appear in the classical literature" is worth the same to us as any other answer.

Nothing we sell will contain a forecast of events. The pressure here is worth spelling out slowly. Suppose you pay for a written report about a job transfer. It says the coming months look demanding, names two things worth watching, and says plainly that a chart cannot settle whether the transfer works out. You would be within your rights to feel short-changed: you paid, and the price implied confidence. Now put me on the other side of that complaint every week for a year. The cheapest way to stop hearing it is to write with a little more certainty each time. The price starts editing the text. Instead, money buys time, teaching, source checks, and a structure for a decision.

We will not guarantee an outcome. There are two ways to honour a guarantee like that: control what happens, or decide afterwards what counts as success. Instead we guarantee the things that are ours to guarantee, the price, the scope and the refund path, all written before you pay, as set out in what an honest reading looks like.

Screens we will not build

Nothing here runs a clock at you. No countdown, no "two slots left", no price that rises tonight. Urgency works by removing the time in which a person might think, and thinking time is the thing we are trying to sell. The Central Consumer Protection Authority notified guidelines on dark patterns in November 2023, naming 13 practices, false urgency and nagging among them. The law arriving is not why we refuse. Instead, the price you see today is the price next month, and the offer will still be there when you have finished thinking about it.

We will not send you an alarm about a transit, meaning a planet arriving at a new position. The pressure is the metric. A notification product is judged by how often it gets opened, worry is the cheapest thing to put in one, and over a few quarters the alerts sharpen on their own. Instead the calendar sits still and you open it when you want it.

Two more belong here, and each needs its own essay rather than a paragraph. We are not building a daily horoscope, the most requested thing on this list. We are not designing for time spent either. Both are arguments I owe you at length, and I will make them properly another time.

Sentences we will not write

We will never tell you that members get the real answer. That promise only works if the free layer is left knowingly incomplete, which means earning from confusion we chose to leave in place. Instead the essays and their plain-English gists stay free. Money buys more of our attention, not a truer version of the same facts.

We will not name a problem and then decline to specify it. Not in a reading, not in an email, not in a line our software generates. That move is the load-bearing beam of the whole fear trade, and it is taken apart in fear is not guidance.

Now read what is not on this list, because that is the honest part. We charge money. Paid membership is coming, and so are guides you buy once. I am not offering a company that has renounced revenue. I am offering one that has written down which revenue it will not take, and everything we put a price on has to clear every line above first. Calm, bounded, priced in advance, or it does not ship.

Advertising is postponed rather than refused, and I would rather say so plainly than imply a cleanliness we have not committed to. I do not much want to find out who bids highest for space on a page about doshas. If we ever do run ads, the blocked categories will be published before the first one appears.

None of this assumes I am a better person than the practitioners I have criticised. It assumes the opposite, which is why the rules are kept where other people can read them, and why breaking one leaves something behind. A commission shows up in the ledger. An affiliate payment shows up as a tracking code inside a link. Paid placement shows up beside a price list. A forecast shows up in the text of a reading you were sent.

If a line here ever comes out, it will not come out quietly. It will come out with a dated note on this page saying which line, when, and who decided.