How to Check an Online Puja Service Is Genuine: An 11-Point Checklist

Booking a puja from another country strips away every ordinary signal you would normally use. You cannot visit the premises, you do not know the neighbourhood, you have no family member who used them, and you often cannot judge whether a site looks credible in an unfamiliar market. Meanwhile the subject matter — a dosha, an ill parent, an unperformed rite — makes people less inclined to ask hard questions and more inclined to just get it done. That combination is precisely what bad operators rely on. What follows works as a test of any service, ours included — and if you want to apply it to us specifically, our NRI puja service, the pujas we perform and what it takes to book puja online with us are what you would be testing it against.

Ask these before paying anyone. One: who specifically will perform the ritual, and can I see them? Two: will I hear my own name and gotra in the sankalp? Three: can I watch it live, and is that call private or a shared stream? Four: will I receive an unedited recording, or only selected photographs? Five: where exactly will the puja be performed? Six: is the quoted price final, including samagri and dakshina? Seven: what is the refund and cancellation policy? Eight: is there a verifiable physical address and a working phone number? Nine: what happens if I am not satisfied? Ten: will prasad actually reach my address, or only an address in India? Eleven: what are you telling me this ritual will achieve?

The first ten are practical. The eleventh is diagnostic, because the answer tells you what kind of operation you are dealing with. A service describing the tradition accurately will say a puja is an observance performed for a stated purpose. A service to avoid will promise you an outcome — the visa, the marriage, the verdict, the recovery — or will tell you that a larger, costlier version works better. Nothing in the tradition supports the idea that spending more produces a stronger result, and any operator implying it is selling on anxiety rather than on ritual. That is the single clearest signal available to you, and it costs nothing to test.

Guaranteed results, in any wording. Urgency that did not come from the calendar — a real deadline is a tithi or a festival, not a countdown timer. Fear framing: being told your dosha is severe, dangerous, or worsening. A diagnosis offered before anyone has looked at your chart. Prices that are not published, or that change once you engage. Pressure to pay outside the platform, by bank transfer or UPI to a personal account. Stock photographs of priests — reverse image search them, it takes seconds. No physical address. No refund terms. And unreachability after payment, which is the one you can only test by having a real conversation before you pay.

Reverse image search the priest photographs and the temple images. Search the business name alongside words like "review", "complaint" and "refund" rather than only visiting their own testimonials page. Check whether the address on the site resolves to a real place on a map. Call the phone number and see whether a person answers. Look for a Google Business Profile and read the reviews there rather than the ones the site has curated for itself. Check whether the site says anything at all about what it does not do — an operation willing to name its own limits is usually describing itself accurately elsewhere too.

It would be poor form to publish this and not apply it to ourselves, so: our pandits are named and photographed on our pandits page; you hear your own sankalp on a private video call and receive the full recording; pujas are performed in Ujjain; prices are flat and all-inclusive with nothing added afterwards; our address and phone number are published and answered; and our cancellation and shipping terms are linked in the footer of every page rather than buried. Our how it works page sets out each step, including what happens if something goes wrong.

Two things, stated plainly because a checklist you exempt yourself from is worthless. We do not ship prasad outside India. Our shipping policy is India-only; devotees abroad have it sent to family, and we would rather say so than take a booking on a promise we cannot keep. We have not yet published a sample puja recording on the site. We will send you a real one on WhatsApp if you ask, but we have not put a public one up, and until we do, that is a legitimate gap in our own evidence. There is also detail we do not publish about individual pandits' training, because we could not do it accurately for all of them.

A genuine religious service should be willing to tell you what it cannot do, refuse work it is not suited to, and let you verify what it claims. An operation that only ever tells you yes — yes we can send a pandit to your house in Toronto, yes prasad reaches Sydney, yes the puja will resolve the court case — is telling you something important, just not the thing it intends. Apply the eleven questions to us and to everyone else. If you want to see how a remote ritual actually works before deciding anything, read about joining a puja live on video, or start with the NRI guide if you are booking from abroad.