Holy Tea

I wanted to build the Christian app that actually knows who is in your life, because that is where faith gets hard, like the sister you are not speaking to or the dad with the diagnosis. Every other app just hands you a concordance or a broadcast reading plan and knows nothing about you. Holy Tea gives you guides with personality and memory you can chat with about the real people you are carrying, always grounded in scripture that is quoted word for word and never made up.

• The Circle, where you add the real people in your life and the guides remember their story over time, connecting each person to a curated biblical parallel like Joseph and his brothers or Ruth and Naomi
• Grace Drafts, a say-it-here-first flow that helps you pour out what you would say to someone, mirror it through scripture, and shape a version you could actually say. Nothing is ever sent
• Living Journeys, short 5-to-7-day reading plans generated from your actual situations by name, instead of the same broadcast plan everyone else gets
• A Daily Pour verse plus six distinct guides with their own voices, from Mercy the group-chat friend to the mentor guides, two of them free
• A full 8-language launch with native scripture book names, localized crisis lines, and per-culture voice primers so it feels local everywhere

• A scripture provider registry running 7 public-domain translations live across 217,749 verse rows, so scripture is retrieved verbatim or left out entirely and the model can never hallucinate a verse
• A per-person memory pipeline with embedding retrieval, fact and event extraction, arc-state tracking, and time-based memory callbacks like 'one month since Thanksgiving'
• An env-switchable AI provider split, routing the free tier to a cheap flash model and paid to Claude Haiku, all through the Vercel AI Gateway with a four-block prompt cache, a cost guard, and a spend-check cron
• Voice-engineered guide system prompts with drift guards and a shared safety primer layered above every personality, so crisis topics route to real help
• A 31-table Supabase schema with row-level security everywhere, SECURITY DEFINER counter RPCs, and a profile-lockdown trigger, wrapped in Capacitor shells for iOS and Android plus 10 background crons

• All scripture is quoted verbatim and stored as references only, never as generated text, which is the anti-hallucination guarantee no ChatGPT wrapper can honestly make
• The guides bring up your people on their own, like noticing it has been about a month since a fight and gently asking how your heart is, which turns memory into something that actually feels like care
• A curated Parallel Library of 163 biblical relationship arcs, so the scripture framing is theologically vetted instead of freely generated
• It shipped in 8 fully translated languages on day one with native book names and localized crisis resources, not English with bolt-on translations

An intense sprint of about 11 days, first commit 2026-07-03 and latest 2026-07-14.

11 days · 129 commits

The biggest challenge was making absolutely sure scripture is never invented, which I solved structurally by storing references only, enforcing canon-bounds validation, and quoting verbatim from a 217k-row verse corpus. On top of that I had to keep costs sane with a tiered provider split and prompt caching, build a real memory and extraction pipeline, and navigate serious compliance ground like California SB 243, which pushed the positioning from friend to guides. Getting a 31-table schema, 8 locales, monetization, push, and store prep all verified and green in one sprint was a grind.