Myth vs method · The gist
The free kundli
A free birth-chart report costs a website almost nothing to produce, which is why it runs to hundreds of pages, and why the thing that actually has a price is the conversation it leaves you wanting.
This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.
In India a birth chart is called a kundli. Dozens of websites will make you one for nothing. Nikhil Verma asks what the free version is for.
Start with what it costs to make. A chart is arithmetic: put in a date, a time and a place, and out come the positions of the sun, moon and planets. The table of positions most of the industry uses can be downloaded free, and a commercial licence is a one-time fee of a few hundred Swiss francs. That fee is per project, never per chart. So the ten millionth chart costs what the first did, which is close to nothing.
That explains the length. One large service advertises a free report of over three hundred pages. Pages are the cheapest thing in the building. It also explains the contents, which usually include the doshas, the named faults a chart is said to carry, and the remedies suggested against them.
If the fault and the fix are both free, what is sold? The sentence after them. A printed instruction cannot tell you whether it applies to you, or what happens if you ignore it. A person can, and people charge by the minute.
Verma checks the money, going by the trade press rather than by filings he has read. Entrackr reported in January 2026 that India's largest astrology app took Rs 1,176 crore from operations in the year to March 2025, against Rs 651 crore the year before, and that its shop, selling gemstones, beads and ritual goods, reported over Rs 140 crore across 2025 on the company's own account. The objects are the smaller part. The bigger part is metered time on the phone, and the free report is what brings people to it.
Zero also does not behave like a very low price. In a 2007 experiment, people chose between a cheap chocolate at one cent and a good one at fifteen; most took the good one. Drop both by a cent, so the gap is unchanged, and most switch to the free one.
He is not against free charts. Before this software, only the astrologer knew what your chart held, and you could not check him. Now you can. His complaint is narrower: where the free part stops, and what has been built on the other side of that line.
Words decoded
- kundli, or janam kundali (जन्म कुंडली)
- a birth chart; a map of where the sun, moon and planets stood at the moment and place you were born
- dosha (दोष)
- a named fault a chart is said to carry, such as the Mars flag checked before many marriages; in practice, a warning label
- remedy
- a suggested action or object said to reduce a dosha: a mantra, a fast, a ritual, a gemstone
- ephemeris
- a table showing where the sun, moon and planets were, and will be, on any given date
- dasha (दशा)
- a system that divides a life into long stretches of years, each stretch assigned to one planet
- funnel
- a business term for the path built to carry a stranger step by step to a paying customer
- crore
- ten million, so Rs 1,176 crore is a little under twelve billion rupees
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