Trust
Built Shomer Shabbos
A shul app that gets Shabbos wrong once is finished — and it should be. So Shuli treats halachic correctness the way hospitals treat sterility: as an engineering discipline with checks, not a feature with a toggle.
The Shabbos gate
Every push notification passes a gate before it sends. From candle lighting to havdalah, it queues — and nothing anyone posts can jump it.
Your coordinates, your minhag
The quiet window is computed from each shul’s own latitude, longitude, and timezone — candle lighting at your minhag’s offset (18, 20, 30, or 40 minutes), not a hard-coded default.
Multi-day Yom Tov, handled
Two-day Yom Tov, Yom Tov straight into Shabbos, Rosh Hashanah’s three-day stretch — the gate holds notifications through the whole window and releases after havdalah.
Israel and chutz la’aretz
A shul in Yerushalayim and a shul in Lawrence get different Yom Tov calendars. The engine knows, per shul, automatically.
Checked on every release
An automated battery of Shabbos-gate assertions — including the 40-minute-minhag case and DST boundaries — runs in CI before any code ships. The zmanim engine is spot-checked against the luach by hand before real shuls rely on it.
The Tishrei freeze
The stakes are highest exactly when the calendar is fullest — so we don’t ship during it.
Before Rosh Hashanah
Code freezes days ahead of Erev Rosh Hashanah. The season runs on software that’s already proven itself.
Shabbos & Yom Tov
No deployments inside any Shabbos or Yom Tov window, all season — the same rule the product enforces for your notifications.
Founder sign-off
Zmanim, Shabbos behavior, and live payment flows each carry a named review gate a person signs — not a checkbox a script marks.
Security & tenancy
A shul’s member list, giving history, and conversations are sensitive. Isolation is enforced where it can’t be forgotten — in the database.
Every table is shul-scoped
Row-level security enforces membership on every tenant table in the database itself — not in app code. Your members see your shul. Nobody else’s.
Proven, not promised
A 195-assertion automated test suite exercises the isolation policies — cross-tenant reads, privilege escalation, guest paths — on every change.
Public pages are opt-in, allowlisted
Anything a guest can see (like a public seat page) goes through a dedicated function that returns only whitelisted fields, only for shuls that switched it on. Member prices and member data never leak.
Money on Stripe’s rails
Donations settle directly into your shul’s own Stripe account. Card numbers never touch Shuli’s servers, and refunds are one click in the dashboard.
The independence commitment
The shul-software story of the last decade is consolidation: beloved tools acquired, prices raised, roadmaps frozen. Shuli is founder-owned and independent, and the commitment is simple: we will not become the roll-up. Your data exports freely — members, pledges, donations, CSV for your accountant — so staying with Shuli is a choice you re-make because it’s good, not a wall you can’t climb.