Why we built Third House

We came to astrology as skeptics, albeit intellectually curious ones. A great many people believe in it, and we wanted to honor that with genuine curiosity. We were naive enough not to know there were different traditions at all, so stumbling onto them made us realize astrology is a vast universe of thought and philosophy, and we wanted to keep exploring it with the same open curiosity, starting with a few of the more popular traditions.

If we were going to build something genuinely useful, it had to be precise. It had to keep hallucinations, the AI habit of confidently making things up, to a bare minimum, bring real respect to each tradition, and be transparent enough with astrologers to bear their scrutiny.

And of course, alongside the AI, we wanted a personal touch, which mattered to us from the jump. We know the painstaking work that goes into reading a chart, and the effort astrologers put into interpretation, so we wanted to give them a more visible place to offer their readings at the click of a button, especially for anyone who starts their journey with AI and wants to end it with a real human.

Then we tested it on ourselves in earnest, and it turned out to be genuinely helpful. We think it’s probably most helpful once you’ve done some inner work, meaning you already have a decent read on your behaviors, your reflexes and how you were raised. A chart then gives that work a vocabulary, so a pattern you’ve half-noticed for years finally has a name, and a timeline, so you can anticipate what’s coming and revisit what’s been with a little more clarity, proactively and retroactively.

There’s a slightly odd bit of tech vernacular for using what you built yourself, which is eating your own dog food. We’ve been eating ours, and somewhere along the way we converted ourselves, so now we want to share it with amateurs, professionals, the curious and the skeptical alike.

The Third House team

P.S. The astrologers join after the beta. We wanted Mercury right first.