The free kundli

Before the chart there is a form, and the form is the part worth a minute of your attention.

Three of its fields are inputs to a calculation. Date of birth, time of birth, place of birth. The arithmetic that produces a janma kuṇḍalī (जन्म कुंडली), a birth chart, needs those three and nothing else. Meghnad has set out what the machine does with them in what a birth chart actually computes; the short version is that the output is 10 numbers and a list of stated conventions.

Now look at the rest of the form. Your name, which no planet has ever responded to. Your sex, which changes the wording of the paragraphs and not one degree of any position. On several of the large sites, a mobile number with a country-code menu beside it, sitting on the form with the birth details.

None of this is hidden and none of it is unusual. Anyone who has filled in a form online knows what a phone number is for. I raise it because it is the plainest available statement of what the page is. Three fields feed a calculation. The others feed a business, and the business is not the calculation.

There is a business word for this: a funnel. It means the path built to turn a stranger into a paying customer, laid out so that as few people as possible drop out along the way. It is standard practice, used by firms that sell shoes and firms that sell software. What is worth examining is not that a funnel exists here. It is what this particular one is made of, and which part of a worried person it is shaped to catch.

I am not going to name companies, because the pattern belongs to none of them in particular. Every page I describe sits on the first screen of results for free kundli, and each claim here takes about a minute to check against whichever of them you open.

What a copy costs

Start with production, because everything else follows from it.

The calculation is deterministic. The same inputs give the same output every time, on any machine, forever. Positions come from an ephemeris, which is a table of where the bodies were and will be. The one most used in this trade is the Swiss Ephemeris, published by the Swiss firm Astrodienst; its source code and its data files can be downloaded for nothing, and they cover a span of some 30,000 years. A developer has two choices: take the free version and agree to publish their own code on the same open terms, or buy a professional licence instead. That licence is listed at 750 Swiss francs for a first project and 1,550 for an unlimited one.

Whichever door a company walks through, note the shape of the fee. It is charged per project. It is never charged per chart.

So the tenth chart costs the same as the ten millionth, which is to say it costs a rounding error on a server bill. That single fact explains almost every design decision on these pages, starting with length. One large site advertises a free report of more than 300 pages. Another's kundli software page says more than 50. Nobody is being generous. Pages are the cheapest thing in the building, and 300 of them cost what three would. What length buys is a feeling that a great deal has been handed over, and more room for items that might need attention.

That cheapness bought the reader something too. Before this software became common, getting a chart made meant paying a person to do the arithmetic, and afterwards only that person could tell you what the chart said. You could not check them. Today anyone can generate their own positions in ten seconds and set them beside a second tool's, and where the two disagree, the reason is a stated convention rather than a private matter between you and an expert. That gain is real, and it landed on the reader's side of the counter for once.

What the report is arranged to hand you

The contents list tells you the design better than any critic could.

One of the big sites sets out what its free report covers. Among the sections: predictions by daśā (दशा) period, which is the running planetary period that divides a life into stretches of years; predictions by house; favourable periods; and then a section on doṣa (दोष), the named faults a chart is said to carry, with the remedies set against them. Mantras, fasts, pujas, gemstones, colours. That last part is free too. The flag and the fix are both given away.

Which raises the question the whole arrangement turns on. If the cure is printed for nothing, what is left to sell?

The answer is the sentence after the cure. Software can print an instruction naming a stone, a metal, a finger and a day. What software cannot do is answer the questions that instruction creates. Whether it applies to you. Which of the flags matters. What happens if you do nothing. A printed prescription with nobody standing behind it is not an ending. It is a prompt, and the prompt has a price.

The flags themselves are not scarce, either. Several of the best-known ones catch a very large share of all charts ever cast, which I have gone through in this series more than once and will not repeat. Run a long enough list of named faults against any chart at all and the list will return several hits. A report does not have to be dishonest to end on an unsettled note. It only has to be complete.

Now the word doing the heavy lifting. "Free" is not a low price. It is a different kind of decision, and there is a clean experiment on that.

In 2007 Kristina Shampanier, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely published a paper in the journal Marketing Science called "Zero as a Special Price". One of its studies was a booth at MIT, 398 people, two chocolates: a Hershey's Kiss and a Lindt truffle. In the first condition the Kiss cost 1 cent and the truffle 15. In the second, the Kiss cost nothing and the truffle 14. The gap between the two is 14 cents either way, so ordinary reasoning says the choice should not move. Among people who took a chocolate, the Kiss went from 27 per cent to 69 per cent.

Zero stops behaving like a price and starts behaving like a reason. A free report is not competing with a paid one on value for money. It is arriving in the part of the head that does not weigh.

Where the price is

Follow the incentive. In this case you barely have to, because the numbers are published.

There are three doors after the free report, in ascending order of what they take. The first is a paid report, more detailed than the free one and delivered as a document; one large site lists several such reports at Rs 299 on the page I read. The second is time with a person, charged by the minute. The third is the shop.

The second door is the large one. The chat platforms advertise a first chat free, then per-minute rates that run from about 15 rupees a minute to well over 100, depending on the astrologer. For the money I am going by the trade press, not by a filing I have read myself. Entrackr, reporting in January 2026, put the largest company's revenue from operations for the year to March 2025 at Rs 1,176 crore against Rs 651 crore the year before, and Inc42 carried the same two numbers. The same Entrackr report gives the company's store more than Rs 140 crore of revenue across 2025, sold over 300 product lines: rudraksha, gemstones, bracelets, idols, ritual goods.

That store number came from the company itself, not from an audited account I have seen. It also covers a different twelve months from the revenue figure. So treat the comparison as rough, not exact.

Rough is enough. The objects are the minority of that business. The bulk of it is minutes.

This is worth sitting with, because the usual criticism of this trade points at the gemstone counter, and the gemstone counter is the smaller half. What is sold at scale is conversation, metered, with a free document doing the introductions.

Look hard at that seam. The free thing is produced by software that cannot be asked a follow-up question: it prints a flag and stops. The paid thing is a person who can answer, on a meter. A machine raises the worry. A person charges to settle it. The two are halves of one arrangement, and the arrangement works the same whether or not anybody in the chain means any harm.

So my complaint is a narrow one, and it is not that the arithmetic became free. It is where the free part stops, and what has been built on the far side of that line.

There is also the question of what you handed over, since a date, a time, a place and a phone number together identify a person quite well. Ankit has written down where we stand on birth details and who may hold them in the refusal list, and I am not going to cover it twice.

So, in practice. Keep the computed part. Positions, signs, birth star, dasha dates: that is arithmetic, it is yours, and you can verify it anywhere. Stop where the document stops describing the sky and starts describing you. Everything past that point is interpretation, and interpretation genuinely cannot be free, because a person has to do it and a person has to eat.

If you want that conversation, have it. Settle its price while you are calm, though, and not four minutes after reading the word dosha. And if you do not want the call, leave the number out. The report will still generate. It always would have.

Go back and look at the form once more. Count the fields the arithmetic actually needs.