Two ratings, £199 a month: a UK reseller turned a "deal-hunting group" into an app
What it is A alert app for secondhand resellers: it watches Facebook Marketplace, Vinted, Gumtree, and eBay at once and pushes a notification when a new under-priced listing appears. The faster you are, the more you earn.
Why it took off It hasn't really taken off: the UK shopping Top Grossing chart has a low bar. At £50–200 per subscription, a few trial-to-paid conversions were enough to push it from #199 to #12. User acquisition relied only on the founder's own small accounts posting their hauls and on reseller communities.
BHow you could follow it Pick countries with strong local secondhand platforms, such as Germany, France, Spain, or Italy. Go deep on one category first, tier pricing by alert speed, price it against local deal-hunting groups, bundle a paid community, and have real resellers recruit users by posting their own hauls in first person.
- Data (updated daily) · Launched 2026-09-16 · UK rating 2 · 11-08 charted in 1 stores
iOS · best category chart rank · by store Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-08 (12 days, 12 observations). Lower rank is higher; gaps mean it wasn't charted that dayiOS · Ratings count · UK Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-08 (12 days, 12 observations). Apple doesn't publish download counts; rating growth is a proxy for downloads.
MarketBotPro has been on the App Store for 7 weeks and has only 2 ratings worldwide, yet in Nov 6 it reached #12 on the UK App Store shopping Top Grossing chart. It isn't a hit. What stands out is the price: an alert tool that watches new listings on secondhand platforms, starting at £49.99 a month and topping out at £199.99. Below: what it is, why so few people got it onto a chart, where the money comes from, who it competes with, and whether the approach is worth copying in other countries.
Six game consoles in one day
On Oct 21, MarketBotPro's TikTok account posted a video whose caption began "I meant to film a whole day of vlogs, but I was busy buying stuff." It listed the day's 6 deals: an Xbox Series S bought for £130 on Gumtree that could sell for £220–230; an Xbox Series X bought for £180 that could sell for £430–450; a PS5 with two controllers bought for £320... Total spend £1,620, market value £2,340–2,460, "before fees, that's 700+ pounds of potential profit in one day. Every one came from MarketBot Pro's alerts."
The video has 1,406 views, the account's highest so far (TikTok, 11-06). The account has 512 followers and 30 posts, and most of its other videos get only a couple hundred to six hundred-odd views.
That's the whole story of this product: its maker is a phone and console reseller, and he films his own deals.
What it is
A "new listing alert" for secondhand resellers. You set a category (iPhone, game consoles, cars, sofas) or keyword, plus city, radius, price range, and words to exclude from titles. It then watches Facebook Marketplace, Vinted, Gumtree, and eBay at once and pushes a phone notification whenever a matching new listing appears. It also keeps profit and offer logs.
The pitch is one line, which the videos repeat: "The good deals on Marketplace don't go to the best haggler. They go to whoever messages first." Good deals vanish within minutes, and manual refreshing can't keep up.
So it charges by speed (UK App Store page):
| Tier | Monthly fee | Alert delay target | Platforms / search count | Member group chats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | £49.99 | 5 minutes | 1 platforms, 3 searches | 1 |
| Plus | £69.99 | 3 minutes | 3 platforms, 5 searches each | 2 |
| Pro | £89.99 | 2 minutes | All platforms, 6 searches each | More |
| Premium / VIP | £129.99 / £199.99 | As fast as 60 seconds | All | All VIP features |
There's also a separate line for car dealers: Trade £49.99, Trade Plus £129.99, Trade Pro £199.99. All are billed monthly, with a 7-day free trial first.
The developer, Luke Hannah, has only this one app, listed in Sep 16, English only.
How it got onto a chart with so few people
Look at its daily rank on the UK shopping Top Grossing chart: 10-28 #142, then steady decline, 11-02 dropping to #199; 11-03 suddenly jumped to #15, then 11-04 #41, 11-05 #70; 11-06 jumped to #12 again. Throughout this period the rating count stayed at 2, not one more. It never entered the overall chart and never appeared on any chart outside the UK.
"Slow decline, then a sudden jump" is what sporadic payments from a high-priced subscription look like: a charge on day 8 after a 7-day trial ends, or a renewal from an existing user. A single £50–200 payment comes in, and the rank spikes. It's not sustained growth.
That jump happens because the UK shopping Top Grossing bar is very low. 11-06 sits next to two package-tracking apps and a "Marketplace: Buy & Sell" app with only 15 ratings. Going by rank and price, it's probably a handful to a dozen-plus transactions a day, with monthly revenue at most in the low thousands of pounds (my estimate, no public data).
The only visible review is a 5-star one from Oct 22, titled "Great Value For Money": "Customer service is great, very helpful all the time... I've already made money..."
Where the money comes from: priced after Discord deal-hunting groups
£49.99 a month is outrageously expensive for an alert tool. The US's Flipify charges by watchlist size, at $5–10. But the UK resale scene already has this price point: "cook groups" on Discord sell "bot alerts + private channels + a community of peers." A UK firm called Toffee Games sells the same thing on Instagram, watching Facebook, Gumtree, and CeX, at £49.95 a month.
MarketBotPro starts at £49.99, almost the same. What it really sells is the cook group, just with the bot moved into an app and the number of group chats turned into an upgrade lever. Users compare it to "I already spend £50 a month in a group," not to "another app charges only $5."
There's another layer: the pricing buttons on the website marketbotpro.org link directly to a Stripe 7-day trial, so it can also take payment on the web and bypass Apple. What you see on the App Store may be only part of the revenue (how much goes through the website can't be seen from outside).
Where users come from
Everything runs through small channels the founder controls. No visible paid acquisition, no media:
- Own TikTok @marketbotpro: posting hauls and screenshots of user reviews ("made £450 during the free trial", "I hope others in our area don't download it"), riding the console market boosted by GTA 6, which launched in Nov 19. From Nov 5 it began promoting "tell us how fast an alert you need and how many platforms, and we'll build you a custom subscription."
- Instagram @marketbot_pro: 178 followers while following 2,378 accounts. It seems to have followed reseller accounts one by one and waited for follow-backs.
- Reseller communities: Luke Hannah joined a paid phone-reselling community called "6 Figure Phone Flipping" in September 2024, then started his own MarketBot Pro community, which has only 3 members. Customer support runs through his personal Facebook profile.
Online there are claims that reseller influencers put its link in their bios as affiliates. No evidence found. The one search result about a "I built a bot to find flips" Reel was posted by the competitor Toffee Games. Nothing turns up for it on X, Reddit, or in the media.
Who it's competing with
It's crowded, and plenty of cheaper options too:
| Product | Scale | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| Swoopa | US App Store: 556 ratings, UK: 62 ratings | Built for US car dealers, with valuations, VIN lookup, and customer management, $47–99/mo; doesn't target Vinted |
| Flipify | US 75 ratings | One watchlist for $5–10/mo, covers Gumtree and Vinted; no community |
| DealScout | US 108 ratings | Facebook only, with a free tier |
| Toffee Games' Discord bot | Unknown | The UK equivalent, £49.95/mo, bot plus private channels |
| Open-source free bot | Claims 30 users | Free, pushes to Discord |
| Facebook "Notify Me", Gumtree saved searches | All users | Free, but slow and misses listings |
From 9 to October, Pouncify, Flipify Motors, Radar: Marketplace Alerts, and the UK's Car Flippers all launched on the App Store, each with only 0–1 ratings. On features MarketBotPro hasn't pulled ahead. What it owns is the combination of full coverage of UK local platforms, speed-based tiers, and a bundled group chat.
If it were you
In one line: the product itself hasn't gained traction. What's worth taking is its pricing method: among resellers already used to paying tens of pounds a month for a "bot + group", price the app to match the group, not the tool-app price.
Good fit for: people who already resell secondhand goods in a given country and have a peer circle; or someone who can team up with a local reseller creator. Small teams that can write scrapers and maintain alert speed.
Not a fit for: people relying on organic App Store traffic (nobody searches the store for "alert tools"); people with no resale experience who can't name a real deal like "6 sales a day"; people afraid of platforms blocking scrapers.
How to do it: pick a country where local secondhand platforms are strong and the US/UK tools don't fully cover, such as Germany's Kleinanzeigen, France's Leboncoin, Spain's Wallapop, or Italy's Subito, plus local Vinted and eBay. Go deep on one category first (consoles, iPhones, or used cars), tier pricing by alert delay, anchor the entry price to what local Discord deal groups charge, and bundle a paid group into the subscription. Take payment both directly on the website and via in-app purchase.
How to get users: the founder or partner creators post real deals firsthand every day (buy price, sell price, which platform), and the founder hangs out in local resale communities and Facebook groups. Screenshots from trial users who made money become content. The run-up to the Nov 19 GTA 6 release is a ready-made hook, since console prices are hot.
When to move: the earlier the better. Apps in this category are launching in batches this fall. Whoever first gets a name in one country's resale circles will leave latecomers only competing on price.
Signs you've misread it: Facebook or Vinted tightens scraping and you can't keep alert speed (speed is the only thing you sell); or trial-to-paid conversion produces mass cancellations in the second month, which would mean the "message first" advantage is canceled out by locals using the same tool. That's exactly what the commenter worried about: "hope nobody else in our area downloads it."
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Swoopa iOS 2024-01 US 556 ratings, UK 62; best UK Shopping Top Grossing rank #87 Built for US car dealers, with valuations, VIN lookup, and CRM; $47/mo and up, Turbo $99. Usable in the UK but doesn't cover Vinted Flipify iOS About 2024 US 75 ratings Priced per watchlist, $5–10/watchlist/mo, much cheaper; no community DealScout iOS Relatively early US 108 ratings Facebook only, with a free tier DealHunter Web 2026-06 Very small Aimed at the US, covers 10 platforms Toffee Games' Discord bot Other 2026 Unknown The UK Discord bot group with the same model, £49.95/mo, watches FB, Gumtree, and CeX; MarketBotPro turned it into an app Open-source free Marketplace bot Open source 2026 Claims 30 users Free, pushes to Discord Facebook Notify Me / Gumtree saved searches Big-company features Has been around all along All users Free, but slow and misses listings - Where users come from
- Verified Owned TikTok @marketbotpro: 512 followers, 30 videos, 260–1,406 views per video; content is profit flexes, screenshots of user reviews, and riding GTA 6 console price hype (TikHub, 2026-11-06)
- Verified Mass following on Instagram: @marketbot_pro has 178 followers while following 2,378 accounts, with the App Store link in the bio
- Verified resale communities (Skool / FB): founder 2024-09 joined 6's Figure Phone Flipping community, then opened a Skool group (3 members); uses a personal FB profile for customer support
- Verified 7-day free trial + direct payment via Stripe on the website: the website has 9 buy.stripe.com trial links, with the charge on day 8
- Inferred Creator affiliate / paid ads: nothing found in the metaads library or web search; the creator-bio affiliate evidence mentioned in the data card couldn't be verified
Why MarketBotPro (iOS 6771156076) charted
A UK reseller's own low-price deal-alert app: it watches Facebook Marketplace, Vinted, Gumtree, and eBay at once, and pushes a notification when a matching new listing appears. Subscriptions are tiered by alert speed, £49.99–£199.99/mo. Research date 2026-11-06.
Bottom line
It never really broke out. It has been on the App Store for 7 weeks, with only 2 ratings worldwide, and it has only appeared on the UK Shopping Top Grossing chart. Its reach to #15 comes from the UK Shopping Top Grossing bar being low, while its price is high (£49.99–£199.99/mo, via Apple in-app purchase). A few trial-to-paid conversions after 7-day trials were enough to move it from #199 to #12. User acquisition runs through the founder's own TikTok / Instagram accounts and community circles, all small-scale and organic. No paid acquisition, creator affiliates, or press coverage found. Its differentiation is selling the UK Discord deal-group (cook group) model as an app with Apple in-app purchase. That gets it onto the chart, but the differentiation alone isn't what's driving growth.
1. Data (our appstore library + Apple API)
- Listed 2026-09-16, developer Luke Hannah, with only these 1 apps under the name; current version 1.0.3 (2026-10-07), English only (iTunes lookup, gb).
- Ratings: 2, averaging 5 stars. No growth from 2026-10-28 to 11-06 (appstore library app_day). The only review visible is a 5-star review from 2026-10-22: "Great Value For Money… customer service is brilliant… I've already made m(oney)…"
- Daily rank on the UK Shopping Top Grossing chart (genre 6024) (appstore library app_day): 10-28 #142 → 10-29 #152 → 10-30 #178 → 10-31 #183 → 11-01 #186 → 11-02 #199 → 11-03 #15 → 11-04 #41 → 11-05 #70 → 11-06 #12. It has never charted on the overall chart or in any other country.
- The trend is "slowly slides down, then suddenly jumps up." That's what a high-priced subscription looks like when it picks up sporadic payments: a 7-day trial charging on day 8, or renewals at expiry. It isn't sustained growth.
- Same day (11-06), its neighbors on the UK Shopping Top Grossing chart were: #10 Package Tracker, #11 a parcel tracking app, #13 Marketplace: Buy & Sell (15 ratings), #14 Parcel (8,560 ratings). That shows the UK category chart's bar is low, and apps with few ratings can still squeeze into the top 15.
- In-app purchase prices (UK App Store page): Basic £49.99, Plus £69.99, Pro £89.99, Premium £129.99, VIP £199.99; dealer tier Trade £49.99, Trade Plus £129.99, Trade Pro £199.99. All billed monthly.
- Revenue estimate: no public data. Roughly inferred from rank and price, probably a few to a dozen transactions a day, with monthly revenue in the low thousands of pounds at most (unverified, an estimate).
2. Product
- Features (App description + website marketbotpro.org): create searches by category (iPhone, cars, sofas, consoles) or custom keywords, plus city, radius, price range, and title exclusion words; you get pushed when there's a match. Tiers differ by alert delay (5 min / 3 min / 2 min / 60 sec), number of platforms and searches, plus the number of member group chats (1–4, all open on VIP). There's also a Profit Tracker and an Offer Tracker.
- All website pricing cards read "£0/mo", with buttons going straight to Stripe's 7-day trial links (9 buy.stripe.com links). So the web also bypasses Apple for payments, and the App Store is just one channel. The website says "iOS or Android," but no Android version turned up in the store (unverified).
- The selling pitch is "whoever messages the seller first gets the good stuff" and "good deals are gone within 15 minutes," charging by speed tier.
III. Competitors
| Product | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from MarketBotPro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Swoopa | iOS / Android / web | 2024-01 | US App Store: 556 ratings, UK: 62 ratings; best UK Shopping Top Grossing rank #87 (appstore library) | Built for US car dealers, with valuations, VIN lookup, and CRM; from $47/mo, Turbo $99. Usable in the UK but doesn't cover Vinted |
| Flipify | iOS / Android / web | About 2024 years | US 75 ratings (dealhunter.io, 2026-10-24) | Priced per watchlist, $5–10/watchlist/mo, much cheaper; covers Gumtree and Vinted. No community |
| DealScout | iOS | Relatively early | US 108 ratings | Facebook only, with a free tier, checks hourly |
| DealHunter | Web / iOS / Android | 2026-06 | US 0 ratings | US-wide resale, covers 10 platforms |
| Spottable | iOS / Chrome | — | — | Focused on per-listing price estimates, from $4.99 |
| Toffee Games' Discord bot | Discord (UK) | 2026 | Has IG posts, scale unknown | The most direct rival: also UK-focused, watches FB / Gumtree / CeX, £49.95/month, selling point is private channels plus community. MarketBotPro's £49.99 starting price is almost identical |
| Open-source free bot (Reddit r/passive_income post) | Open source / Discord | 2026 | Claims 30 users | Free, watches FB / Wallapop / Vinted / Mercari, pushes to Discord |
| Copit and other Vinted bots | Web | — | — | Covers European Vinted, with auto-buy |
| Facebook's built-in "Notify Me", Gumtree saved searches | Big-company features | Has been around all along | All users | Free, but slow and misses listings (people often complain on r/Flipping) |
| 2026-09 to October, new similar products | iOS | 2026-09 / 10 | All rated 0–1 | Pouncify (9-09), Flipify Motors (9-17), Radar: Marketplace Alerts (10-08), Car Flippers (UK, 10-30). The category is getting crowded |
Lots of competitors, plenty of cheap ones too. MarketBotPro has no clear feature gap.
IV. Growth tactics (evidence found)
- Own TikTok @marketbotpro: 512 followers, 30 posts, 356 likes in total. Recent videos mostly get 260–630 views, top one 1,406 (10-21 "made 6 sales in one day just by messaging first"). Content is flip-profit showcases, user comment screenshots, and riding the GTA 6 (11-19 release) console-resale buzz (TikHub, 2026-11-06).
- Own Instagram @marketbot_pro: 178 followers, but following 2,378 accounts. This is bulk-following resale accounts and waiting for follow-backs, i.e. manual growth; the bio links to the App Store (scraped via Jina).
- Facebook: the founder uses the personal profile "Luke Hannah" as customer support (the profile reads "MarketBot Pro support").
- Skool community: Luke Hannah joined the "6 Figure Phone Flipping" community 2024-09, and started his own "MarketBot Pro / reselling-operators" community, which has only 3 members. He's a phone flipper himself and finds his earliest users in that circle.
- Meta ads: our metaads library returns no match by App id or domain (the library only tracks products on its list, so no match doesn't mean they aren't advertising).
- X / Reddit / media: x-radar searched 60 days and found 0 posts; nothing turned up on Reddit or in media.
- The data card mentions "multiple reselling influencers distributing via bio links", but no evidence was found. The "I built a reselling sourcing bot" Reel that came up was posted by another competitor, Toffee Games, not promoting MarketBotPro.
- Retention tactic: members-only group chat unlocked by tier, to keep people; plus a 7-day free trial with the first charge on day 8.
V. Why it shows up on the charts
- High price × low bar in the category chart: a £49.99–£199.99 subscription is enough to push it from #199 to #12–15. The evidence is the two jumps on 11-03 and 11-06, while the rating never moved.
- Pricing copied from UK Discord deal groups: the UK resale scene is already used to paying around £50 a month for a "bot plus group" (Toffee Games charges £49.95/month). MarketBotPro anchors to that range, not to Flipify's $5 per monitored list.
- The founder is a reseller himself: he posts first-person sales showcases in the phone-flipping community, and the messaging hits the pain point of "whoever messages first wins".
- Timing: GTA 6 is set to release on 11-19, console resale is heating up, and its videos ride that topic. How much that lifted the charts is unverified.
VI. Differentiation
- What's really different: a UK-specific platform mix (FB + Vinted + Gumtree + eBay, which most US tools don't cover), tiered pricing by alert speed, community bundled into the subscription (group chat count rises with tier, very much like a cook group), plus a separate dealer product line.
- These aren't why it "broke out". It didn't really break out; a high price just means a few paying users stand out on the Top Grossing chart. Differentiation lets it charge a premium, but it hasn't brought volume.
VII. How visible it is
Almost nobody knows about it: 512 TikTok followers, 178 IG followers, 0 posts on X, no media coverage, not on TrustMRR, no revenue shared publicly. Never charted outside the UK.
VIII. What to take from it
- Among people who have already proven they'll pay in cook groups / Discord paid communities, package "bot + group" as an app plus subscription, and anchor pricing to Discord group prices, not utility app prices.
- Using alert speed as the basis for tiers is a natural upgrade trigger.
- Niche storefront charts in small countries (UK Shopping) have a low bar, so a few high-priced subscriptions can chart, which works as trust signaling. Other small-language secondhand platforms (Kleinanzeigen, Leboncoin, Wallapop, Subito) could copy this playbook.
9. What I'm still unsure about
- Actual paying-user count and retention (we only see 2 ratings).
- Whether there's influencer distribution or paid ads: nothing found, which doesn't mean none exist.
- How much revenue goes through the website's Stripe, bypassing Apple.
- Watching FB and Vinted relies on scraping, which platforms may block, so stability is unknown.
- Whether an Android version exists.
Sources
- iTunes lookup / UK App Store page: apps.apple.com/gb/app/marketbotpro/id6771156076
- Website: marketbotpro.org/
- TikTok @marketbotpro (TikHub API, 2026-11-06); Instagram www.instagram.com/marketbot_pro/
- Skool:www.skool.com/@luke-hannah-8381
- Competitor comparisons: dealhunter.io/alternatives (2026-10-24 verified); Swoopa pricing getswoopa.com/subscription-options/; Flipify www.flipifyapp.com/blog/the-best-facebook-marketplace-alerts…
- Toffee Games' Discord bot: www.instagram.com/reel/DeZoONVsK3r/
- Our libraries: appstore (app_day, chart_rank, app_profile, 2026-10-28 to 11-06), metaads, x-radar