A yajña, and the priest who performs it.

A saṁskāra needs three things that rarely arrive together: somebody who wants the rite performed, a purohita who performs it, and a day on which it may be performed. Yajña Today is where the three meet — a calendar that answers the third question, a search that answers the second, and a thread between two people that settles the first.

The two sides have names, and the app uses them. The yajamāna is the person on whose behalf the rite is performed — you, or somebody in your family. The purohita is the priest who performs it. One account holds one of those roles, and the screens you see are the ones your role has.

If you already have a family purohita, the half of this app that tells you when is useful on its own and asks nothing of you: no search, no request, no message. The pañcāṅga does not care whether you found the priest here.

This is the part of the app with a right answer, so it is the part described in the most detail. The rules come from the śāstra as the tradition has them — for vivāha, from Appendix VII of the Bhaktivedanta Academy’s own compilation — and the app names its source on screen beside every verdict, so a rule can be checked rather than trusted.

A tithi is 12° of separation between the moon and the sun; a nakṣatra is 13°20′ of the moon’s sidereal longitude. Neither is a property of a date. Each is a property of an instant, and a boundary falls where it falls — often in the middle of an afternoon. So the app does not colour a day and stop: it finds the boundaries by bisection and reports them to the minute.

Three states, and not a scale. A day is auspicious if every limb the source requires is satisfied at the same instant and nothing forbidden applies; it is inauspicious wherever a forbidden limb applies at all; and it is unmarked otherwise. An unmarked day carries no colour, because the source says what is auspicious and what is forbidden and is silent about everything else — and an app that filled that silence with a shade of green would be inventing.

A day can hold both kinds of window at once, and when it does you get both. A usable morning under a forbidden evening is exactly the case a single colour per day would hide, so that cell is split at the boundary minute instead.

Expect an empty calendar for most of the year, and read it as correct rather than broken. For vivāha the source lists four months — Māgha, Phālguna, Vaiśākha and Jyeṣṭha — and forbids the four of cāturmāsya outright. The two sets do not overlap, so most of the year holds no auspicious window at all. A calendar that has nothing green in Kārtika is telling you the truth.

When a day is blank or red the app says why, in as many words as it takes: this month is not one the source lists, or the sixth of the waning fortnight is forbidden, or the tithi and the nakṣatra never overlap on this date. A calendar that only tints cells is not much use to somebody trying to choose a date.

Times are reckoned on standard time, never summer time, because that is what the reference pañcāṅga does — and where the difference matters the app says so on the row rather than leaving you to work it out. A wedding time an hour out is a worse failure than a reading an hour out.

The arithmetic is the same engine that Saṅkalpa Today reads, pinned to the same library at a verified tag, so the two apps never disagree about which day a rite falls on. It runs on your device, offline, against a place table built into the app.

Yajña Today is not end-to-end encrypted. Your data is stored in plain text on a server run by the developer, and it could be read by whoever runs that server. That sentence is first on purpose, because a page like this one is where a claim to the contrary would be easiest to make and hardest for you to check.

The reason is in what the app does, not in what was easier to build. Four of its features are readable-by-the-server by construction:

• Finding a purohita near you is a comparison of latitudes and longitudes. A sealed value cannot be compared, sorted or indexed — a distance filter over ciphertext is not a slower search, it is not a search.
• A chat between a yajamāna and a purohita is two strangers who met through this app, on two devices, with no shared secret between them. Exchanging keys between them safely is a different product with a different set of things to get wrong.
• Sharing family details so a rite can be prepared is precisely the act of granting another account read access — that is the whole feature, not a side effect of it. Under end-to-end encryption it would mean re-wrapping a data key for every grant to every member, and revoking one would mean re-wrapping the rest.
• Feedback and ratings are moderated, and a purohita can reply to a rating in public. Nobody can moderate ciphertext, and three parties reading one row is not a secret.

So what protects your data here is stated rather than cryptographic, and that is worth reading as exactly as strong as it sounds. The API is the only reader. Every request is scoped to the account its token belongs to and re-checked against the role that account holds, on the server, every time. A message is readable by its two parties because that is a condition in the query, not a decision a screen makes. The app itself holds no database credentials.

What that means for you, plainly: put nothing into this app that you would not put in an email. Names, dates, places, and the messages between you and your purohita are all readable by the operator. If a later version adds a private ceremony note — a field genuinely belonging to one account and compared with nothing — that field can be sealed. Nothing in the list above can be.

One part does stay on your device, and it is the part you use most. The muhūrta calculation is done locally against a place table built into the app, so choosing a ceremony and paging through a year does not tell the server which dates you were considering. Only a request you actually send leaves the device.

Its sibling My Sādhana Today does encrypt everything before it leaves the device, and that is the right design there, because nothing in it has to be compared between two accounts. Copying that sentence onto this page would have been false, so it is not here.

Yajña Today is free. Every feature is there from the first launch — nothing is locked, nothing expires, and there is no paid tier.

It is written and looked after by one person, and there are bills behind it — the developer accounts, the signing certificates, the hosting, and the server that carries the matching, the requests and the messages. If the app is useful to you and you would like to help carry that, a donation is warmly welcome. It buys nothing extra, because nothing is held back. 🙏

And to be clear about the money that is not here: the app takes no commission on anything arranged through it, charges a purohita nothing to be listed, and does not rank one purohita above another for payment. There is no transaction inside this app at all — what you agree with your purohita is between the two of you.

Thank you — your support keeps this going. 🙏

A bug, an idea, or anything else. This reaches the developer as an email and nothing else happens to it: it is not published, it is not a review of a purohita, and there is no account behind it.

What is this about Something is broken An idea Something else

Your message

Your email (optional) Only used to reply to you. Leave it empty and the message arrives anonymously — there is then no way to answer it.

Website

Send