Every tirtha has a source. Here is ours — the five elements that carry your inquiry from heart to screen, and what it costs to keep the lamp lit.
In Sanatana cosmology, all creation arises from five elements — Prithvi, Jal, Agni, Vayu, Akasha. AtmaSarathy's technical stack maps naturally to these five. This is not metaphor for its own sake; it is a reminder that technology, like matter, is a vehicle for consciousness.
AtmaSarathy is free. It shows no ads. It sells no data. Here is what it costs to run — openly, without mystification. This is what dharmic transparency looks like in the age of software.
Most platforms obscure their costs to justify their pricing or their advertising. AtmaSarathy is different. The seeker deserves to know what sustains the lamp. These are real numbers, not rounded approximations. The AI inference cost — Agni — is the only variable cost. Everything else is fixed or free at this scale.
| Service (Boota) | What it does | Current tier | Monthly cost | Scales to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🪨 Supabase Prithvi · Foundation |
Database, auth, real-time, storage | Free | ₹0 | 500MB DB, 50k MAU free |
| 💧 Resend Jal · Flow |
Transactional email (verify, reset) | Free | ₹0 | 3,000 emails/month free |
| 🔥 Anthropic Claude Agni · Intelligence |
AI inference — Sonnet (auth) + Haiku (guest) | Pay per token | Variable | ~₹0.25/conv (Sonnet, cached) |
| 🌬️ Vercel Vayu · Delivery |
Hosting, serverless functions, CDN | Hobby (Free) | ₹0 | 100GB bandwidth, 100k fn/day free |
| ✨ Domain Akasha · Address |
atmasarathy.com domain registration | Annual | ~₹100/mo | Fixed regardless of scale |
Because Agni is the only variable cost and everything else is free at early scale, the economics are unusually clean. Here is what three stages of growth look like.
AtmaSarathy will never monetise through advertising, data sale, or dark patterns. The moment ads enter a space of inquiry, they contaminate it. The moment data is sold, the seeker becomes the product. Neither is compatible with dharma.
When the cost of running AtmaSarathy exceeds what the founder can sustain personally, the community will be told plainly — and given the choice to sustain it together through voluntary contribution, not coercion.
Should AtmaSarathy ever invite dakshina, it would be an offering, never a price. What is given would go only toward keeping the lamp lit — and whatever flows beyond that need, onward to a dharmic cause. This is the intention held; today, it is simply free.