Launching today
WhatDate
When is it? Festival & holiday dates, sourced and free
1 follower
When is it? Festival & holiday dates, sourced and free
1 follower
WhatDate answers "When is...?" for festivals and holidays, with the source behind every date. • Reliable dates: each date comes with its source or logic - any differences become clear. • Regional dates: see when a day falls in your region or tradition, and why it moves each year. • Free calendar packs: festival, tithi, games/tournament and holiday sets asics for any calendar or the WhatDate app. • Private: no sign-up, no ads, no tracking. Every Date Matters. Because Everything Happens On A Date.
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Hello everyone,
I built WhatDate Portal (https://whatdate.app) to answer a simple question — "what is the significance of this date?" — and to let you bring those dates into your calendar without ads, trackers, or account walls.
If you have ever tried to keep regional festivals, lunar observances, or local civic holidays in a standard calendar, you run into two problems:
1. Standard calendars (and the iCalendar RRULE spec) only truly understand Gregorian repeats. A date governed by a lunar tithi visible at local sunrise, or an equinox, or a regional almanac cannot be expressed as a simple calendar repeat rule.
2. When you look those dates up on traditional panchang or holiday websites, you are met with heavy ad walls, trackers, and a single flattened date that often ignores where you actually live.
WhatDate Portal approaches this on two principles:
1. Computed before declared
Whenever a date follows a mathematical or astronomical rule — lunar tithi and paksha, equinoxes and solstices, Easter, Hebrew festivals, or nth-weekday civic rules — the portal computes it directly in your browser using public-domain analytical astronomy (VSOP87 for the Sun, ELP2000 for the Moon, Meeus reduction). When a date is decided by human authority (a government gazette, bank holiday circular, or school board), the portal lists it as a declared date and cites the primary source.
2. A festival has dates, plural
Where you stand (your city's coordinates and local sunrise) and which tradition you follow (for example, Drik vs. Siddhantic reckoning, or Amanta vs. Purnimanta month systems) are kept as separate axes. A festival observed in Mumbai and the same festival observed by diaspora in London or Toronto can fall on different Gregorian days because sunrise and moonrise differ. The portal shows those differences honestly instead of averaging them away.
What you can do on the portal today:
- Look up any date or festival across cities and traditions, with a plain-English explanation of why two regions or almanacs agree or differ.
- Download ready-made calendar packs in two formats:
* .ics for Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, or any standard calendar app.
* .whatdate for the companion WhatDate mobile app (an offline-first, zero-account app where imported public packs stay silent by default so 40 holidays do not turn into 40 morning alarms, and re-importing a pack updates existing dates by ID instead of creating duplicates).
The portal is completely static in the browser. There are no accounts, no cookies, no analytics scripts, and no ads.
I would love to hear which regional traditions, civic calendars, or astronomical date rules you would find most useful next, or any feedback on the calculations and packs currently live.
- Srinivas
WhatDate answers one question honestly: when is it, really?
Every date is tied to a named source — government holiday lists, panchangas, institutions — and when sources disagree, we show you why, not just a number. For example, Sun enters Makara at 21:10 IST after sunset? That’s why your panchang says Jan 15 and your office calendar says Jan 14.
🔍 Search across public holidays, festivals, and observances from every tradition
📚 Every date sourced; when we don't have one, we say so — we never guess
🗓️ Free .ics files for any calendar
🔓 No account, no cookies, no tracking
📱 Reminder app for Android coming on Google Play
Built for everyone who want clarity on "when is X?" where X is a festival or public holiday or tournament schedule or any published civic event - regional or global.
So WhatDate has one rule: a date is only shown if a named source publishes it, and when sources disagree, you see the disagreement. If we don't have a sourced date (looking at you, Lohri), we say "not yet" instead of making something up.
Would love your harshest feedback on the search — try your trickiest festival, the one your family always argues about. And if you spot a wrong or missing date, tell me; that's genuinely the most useful thing you can do today. 🙏
(Android app is waiting on Google Play review — the web version is the full experience, no login needed.)