Gen Z is paying for guidance that free content cannot deliver. A bride facing torrential rain hired an Etsy witch to cast a spell for clear skies, and consumers keep buying tarot, astrology and spell work even when weather apps and online horoscopes are available for free.
The business is already real. The U.S. psychic-services industry generated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2025, according to a July 2025 IBISWorld report. Revenue grew at an annualized rate of 5.5% over the five years through 2025. IBISWorld also said the market is highly fragmented, leaving room for entrepreneurs who want to organize it.
One of them is Bekoff, 29, a former growth product manager at TaskRabbit and Robinhood. After the wedding that sparked the idea, she built Divina, a marketplace where practitioners offer tarot readings, spell work, Reiki, astrology and other spiritual services. She launched the website Sept. 1.
Divina borrows its model from TaskRabbit. Practitioners set their own rates, and Divina takes a 10% cut of each booking. Bekoff expected to spend her first month recruiting practitioners, but she did not have to. Divina grew organically from two or three practitioners to more than 100, offering over 200 listings.
Many of those practitioners already had social-media audiences and experience selling their services online. Demand is smaller, but it is starting to follow. According to Bekoff, Divina has recorded more than $1,000 in bookings and receives a handful each day.
Customers most often seek guidance about relationships, careers, money and pregnancy. The pitch online often starts with a hook: stop scrolling, this message is for you. A tarot reader flips cards for someone after a breakup. An astrologer tells Virgos that their dream job is right around the corner.
Kaidong Yu, a marketing researcher at City University of Macau, described the appeal as a question of interpretation rather than information. There is already plenty of free mystical content online, he said, but paid practitioners offer specificity: what does this mean for me, in my situation, right now?
That value may have little to do with whether the prediction is accurate. Yu said it can come from the feeling of being heard, receiving a coherent narrative, validating an intuition or turning a confusing situation into a manageable set of possibilities. The practice does not have to eliminate uncertainty, he said. It can simply make uncertainty more psychologically manageable.
That is the business case behind Divina. It is selling a service that free content cannot replicate: personalized interpretation. In a market crowded with content, the buyer is not just paying for mysticism. The buyer is paying for attention, specificity and the comfort of a story that feels tailored to the moment.
Capital rewards clear rules, and this market has them. The fees are simple, the platform is lightweight and the demand is easy to see. What remains unclear is how far a business built on uncertainty can scale before the novelty wears off. For now, the numbers suggest that anxiety is still a monetizable asset.
