Readings with LightUntil this week, paying for something here meant meeting a different price every time you wanted one. A Celtic Cross had its own checkout. A Relationship spread had another. Time with a reader had a third, the course a fourth, and each of them asked for your card again at the moment you were least in the mood to be interrupted — which is to say, in the middle of a question that mattered to you.
That is now one thing. Readings with Light runs on crystals: a single balance on your account that pays for everything here. You top it up once, and after that the site stops asking.
What crystals cost to spend
The price list is short on purpose, and it is the same list everywhere you meet it:
- 100 crystals — a Crush or a Relationship spread
- 150 crystals — a Celtic Cross, all ten cards
- 300 crystals — five minutes with a reader
- 500 crystals — ten minutes with a reader
- 2,000 crystals — the Tarot Course, yours for life
Crystals come in three packs — 500, 1,100 and 2,400 — and the larger ones hold more crystals for each unit of currency, which is not a trick of presentation: the card fee on a small payment is a fixed cost, so a bigger top-up genuinely has more left over to give you. The shop marks whichever pack currently offers the best rate rather than pinning a badge to one and hoping it stays true.
The useful thing to notice about that largest pack: it is the whole course, with four spreads left over.
Beside every crystal price on the site you will also see an approximate figure in your own currency. It is calculated at the entry rate — what crystals cost in the smallest pack — so it always overstates slightly for anyone who bought a larger one. We would rather the number be generous in your favour than flattering in ours.
They do not expire
This is the part that mattered most in deciding to do it at all. Crystals have no expiry date, no monthly reset, no quiet forfeiture if you do not open the site for a season. Tarot is not a subscription habit; people come to the cards in the weeks when something is happening and leave them alone in the weeks when nothing is. A balance that evaporates while you are busy living would be a punishment for the entirely reasonable act of not needing a reading in March.
If you buy crystals and change your mind, you have fourteen days to withdraw from that purchase and be refunded for any crystals from it you have not yet spent. Spending them delivers the reading immediately, which is the point of buying them — and the right of withdrawal lapses for the ones you spend, in the ordinary way that applies to anything delivered digitally the moment it is asked for.
You can also earn them
Crystals are not only bought, and a shop that never says so is selling something it also gives away.
- 100 crystals for creating an account, straight away. That is a full Crush or Relationship spread, and it is meant to be spent rather than admired.
- 5 crystals a day for keeping a reading in your journal. Once a day, not once per reading — we would rather state the cap honestly than promise five times over and let you discover the ceiling by hitting it.
- 200 crystals for walking the Fool's Journey — the twenty-two day passage through the Major Arcana, one card at a time. Reach day twenty-two and they arrive.
Earned crystals and bought crystals are the same crystals. There is no second-class balance, nothing that can only be spent on certain things, and nothing that quietly goes first.
The free readings are still free — and there are more of them than people realise
Crystals buy the long spreads and the human time. They are not a gate in front of the site, and it is worth listing what has never cost anything, because the list is longer than most visitors discover:
- The Card of the Day, every day
- A three-card reading on any question you like — past, present and what it is moving toward — as often as you like
- The Question for Reflection on the front page: a new question every day, and three cards drawn against it without you having to find the words yourself
- A single-card pull, and Catch a Card when you would rather the deck chose
- Yes or No, and This or That when the question is really a fork in a road
- Your numerology profile, and the moon phase and what it asks of you
- The whole Fool's Journey, all twenty-two days — which pays you crystals for finishing it
- Your journal, keeping every reading you want to return to
And if you have an account, your first preview of any paid spread is on us — you can see what a Celtic Cross reads like here before deciding whether ten cards are worth a hundred and fifty crystals to you.
Put the two halves together and a new account starts with a hundred crystals, a free look at a paid spread, and a daily practice that pays five crystals a day for writing it down. It is entirely possible to read here for a long time and never reach the till. That is not an oversight in the design. It is the design.
Why a currency at all
A fair objection to in-app currencies is that they exist to obscure prices — to turn money into tokens so you stop noticing how much you are spending. We take that seriously enough to have built against it: every crystal price on the site carries its currency equivalent beside it, the packs are priced in plain money before you buy, and nothing on the site is priced in crystals alone.
What the currency buys you is the removal of friction at the wrong moment. The old flow interrupted a question with a payment form. The new one lets you decide about money when you are thinking about money, and about the cards when you are thinking about the cards. Those are different states of mind, and a reading goes better when they are not forced to share a screen.
Your balance is in the header. The shop is there when you need it, and quiet when you do not.