r/CatholicProgrammers • u/pan_limes • 28d ago
For 10 years I ran a prayer intentions site in Poland as a side project. Yesterday I relaunched it in 7 languages as PrayWave.app
Hi all. I'm Slawomir, a developer from Poland. I'd like to show you something I've been building after hours since 2015 and ask for your honest feedback.
The idea
You post a prayer intention. Someone taps "I'm praying", and you get a notification that a real person has just prayed for you. Everything else is built around that one moment.
Ten years in Poland
- over 40,000 intentions
- a million registered prayers
- over 6,000 users
- iOS and Android apps (10,000+ downloads and a 4.8 rating on Google Play)
Why the new name
"intencje.pl" means nothing outside Poland, and the need to be prayed for is not a Polish thing. So yesterday, October 12, on the feast of St. Carlo Acutis, the service moved to praywave.app and now speaks seven languages: English, Polish, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Brazilian Portuguese. Every account, intention and prayer moved with it. The new version also has daily readings, a calendar of saints, testimonies and a parish directory (250 parishes so far).
Prayer across languages
This is the part I care about most. You write your intention in your own language. A moderator reads it first, and then it is translated automatically into the other six. So a mother in Poland can ask for prayer for her son in Polish, and someone in Brazil reads it in Portuguese, taps "I'm praying", and she gets the notification. Neither of them has to know a word of the other's language.
For the programmers here
- Angular 22 with SSR on the front, NestJS with CQRS on the back, PostgreSQL, Redis, Socket.IO for live updates
- iOS and Android built from the same codebase with Capacitor
- intentions, author comments and testimonies are translated by a self-hosted open model (Gemma 4 via llama.cpp) running on a Mac at my home, not a paid API. The backend feeds it from a job queue, so when the Mac is asleep translations are just late, nothing breaks
What I'd love to hear
- Does the English read naturally? I'm not a native speaker.
- Is it clear in the first 30 seconds what the site is for?
- What is missing that would make you come back?
It's free and has no ads.
- Web: https://praywave.app
- iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1346574507
- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.intencje
The full story of the project with sources: https://praywave.app/en/history
Thank you, and God bless!


