Hungary's #1 free app on the App Store is a toilet-rating app: a streamer turned a years-old meme from her livestreams into a real product

Budicheck, launched on Oct 30, is a map of public toilets in Hungary where each toilet can be rated from 1 to 10. In its first week, the iOS Hungary store collected 362 ratings averaging 4.97, hit #1 on the overall free chart, and ranked above Google Maps and Waze in the navigation category. On Android it reached 18.8k installs. It was made by Hungarian top gaming streamer duo TheVR. The real spark was their own channel, and the product came second. Below: how it took off, why ordinary developers struggle to copy it, and what you can take away.

Oct 30, a video called "Let's create a better future together"

On Oct 30, TheVR posted a YouTube video titled "Tegyünk együtt egy szebb jövőért! - Budicheck" ("Let's build a better future together! - Budicheck"). The first line: anyone who watches their Friday horror streams knows that one of the most important things these past years has been rating the toilets in the games.

TheVR are Jani and Pisti from Debrecen. Their YouTube channel has about 920k subscribers and 440M total views (vidIQ, 11-04). "budi check" (budi is slang for "toilet" in Hungarian) was a recurring bit in their "Horror Péntek" (Horror Friday) streams: when a toilet showed up in a horror game, they stopped to rate it. The launch video got 320k views in 6 days (YouTube, 11-05). The same clip on the TikTok official account got about 300k views. Facebook and their podcast "The Happy Hour Show" followed. Both also posted on X: Jani shared "Budicheck is already the most popular free app on the App Store," and Pisti posted "started reading the toilet reviews in the app today, I'm dying laughing."

The timing was also good: it landed right in Halloween horror streaming season, when this bit is at its peak every year.

Fans had been rating on paper for years

No one had to teach the rating habit. TheVR's merch shop already sold a "BUDI CHECK sticker pack" that came with an "official Budi Check logbook" for recording scores on 10 toilets and picking a top three (thevrshop.hu). The app just moved what fans were already doing onto their phones. Even the rating tiers are the stream's own lingo, running from "HORROR" up to "TRÓNRA MÉLTÓ" (worthy of the throne).

The reviews section shows who's downloading:

• "I see a toilet and I go in just to give it a 10/10." (App Store Hungary, 11-04)
• "Finally downloaded something other than Candy Crush." (11-02)
• "If Pisti and Jani are making an app, it should be this. It's so them." (10-31)

But it's not all memes. "I thought it was a joke, and it's actually really useful" (10-31). Some people say they're afraid of dirty toilets and would rather hold it, and this app "got me to start using toilets outside my home." Others like that it lists the door codes for locked toilets and call on people to "share the codes for every McDonald's toilet." Hungary has few free public toilets, and many are filthy. On X, someone replied under Jani's tweet: "In a country where the toilet problem will never get solved, this is a damn good idea."

How the numbers grew

(App Store Hungary, 11-02 to 11-06)

• Ratings are only part of it. Android had 18,815 installs (Google Play, 11-05), roughly 50 times the number of iOS ratings. Android has a large share in Hungary, and few iOS users leave ratings. Local media quoted figures of 23.5k new sign-ups in the first weekend and nearly 5000 locations rated by the community (DeHír, 11-02). Combined, that's roughly 3 to 50k users in the first week (estimate).
• A small country lowers the bar to chart. A few hundred ratings got it to #1 on the Hungary overall free chart (down to #2 after 11-06). It outranked Google Maps and Waze in the navigation category, which brought in another wave of organic downloads.
• The buzz is fading, but not to zero. Daily new ratings dropped from 11-03 to around 50 from 121. One week of data isn't enough to tell whether the hype turns into a daily-use tool.
• The perfect scores are suspiciously uniform. Several hundred ratings averaging 4.97 looks like fans rating in bulk. I found no evidence the streamers explicitly called for it.

Local media followed. gsplus (10-31), refresher (11-02), DeHír (11-02, which noted it started in Debrecen), We Love Budapest (11-04), and fmc.hu (11-05) all covered it. "Influencers made a toilet app" is funny by itself, so editors wrote about it and readers shared it.

Is traffic enough?

It pulls people in. Whether they stay depends on the product, and they clearly put real work into that too:

• There's something to do the moment you open it. At launch the map was already seeded with "tens of thousands" of Hungarian points (their store-page wording). They later added about 900 gyms, schools and dorms (scored by floor), plus hospital and government-office floors. Spots nobody has rated are marked "you could be the first," so the empty map becomes an incentive.
• It's built like a game. XP, an all-time and a weekly leaderboard, 32 kinds of "memory cards" you collect by place type, 37 badges (5 of them hidden), friends, and live status (out of paper, queue, blocked). The watch app even has an SOS compass that points you to the nearest open toilet with one tap (budicheck.app).
• Updated daily, with credit to the people who suggest things. The changelog's first line reads: "If a change came from your idea, your name is right here." From 10-30 to 11-04 there was almost a release a day, each one ending with "Köszi, zsami! (Thanks, zsami!)" or "Köszi, rockkid777!" The first night after launch brought in 100+ pieces of feedback (Jani's X post).
• They expand by language, not by country. 11-02 added about 25k points in Romania, and 11-03 added about 12.5k along the Slovak, Serbian, Croatian and Ukrainian borders (Bratislava, Komárno, Košice, Uzhhorod, Subotica, Osijek), with city names in both Hungarian and the local language. It shows up on the Romanian and Slovak navigation charts (#13 and #8), and the people using it are Hungarian minorities there, not locals.

What users most want is photos. Several five-star reviews say "I wish I could take photos, I want to see why it got this score, photos make it believable." The only two-star review complains "it only has Hungarian toilets, and that's exactly when you need it most, when you've got a stomach bug abroad."

Developers are skeptical too. A post on r/programmingHungary titled "The AI era is here: Budicheck by TheVR" has someone calling it a "disgusting AI slop app." Whether it was really built quickly with AI is unverified.

Where the money comes from

It doesn't make money yet. The iOS version is free, and the Google Play listing says no in-app purchases and no ads. For TheVR it works more like a digital merch item: it strengthens the brand, sells a sticker pack, and maybe later takes business verification or sponsorships (inference). The developer is WE ARE MEDIA TECH Bt., the company behind TheVR, and another app on the same developer account is TheVR's official fan app, released 2023 years ago (2442 ratings in the Hungarian store). They already had a ready-made dev team.

Who it's competing with

Toilet finders are an old category, and people in Hungary have built them before. Budicheck isn't the first, it's the first to launch with an audience.

How many people know about it now

In Hungary, a lot of people know it: five or six local outlets have covered it, two streamers promoted it themselves, and merch shops and podcasts are talking about it. Outside Hungary, almost nobody knows: X has no discussion in nearly 30 days, and on r/budapest a foreigner said they couldn't download it on a foreign phone. No copycats seen yet.

If it were you

C: You can learn a playbook from it, "build a tool around a creator's IP," but copying a toilet app isn't worth it. Its traffic comes from a streamer with nearly a million subscribers and a joke they've run on stream for years, and followers can't get either of those. The features (Flush, Budipest) already existed. And it doesn't make money, so it leaves no clear revenue path for latecomers.

Who it's for: developers who have, or can sign, a mid-tier creator partner; creator teams with a steady fanbase and a recurring in-joke among their fans; people working on smaller-language markets who want a country where the bar for charting is low.

Who it's not for: indie developers with no distribution who hope the toilet map feature alone will drive downloads. Budipest is the counterexample: same Hungarian language, same word, and it went years without anyone knowing. Don't go in for quick money either, since nobody in this category has found a real paid model anywhere in the world.

How to do it: don't copy the toilet, copy the structure. Find a joke: something fans are already repeating in chat, comments or on paper, tied to a real everyday routine (rating, checking in, collecting, ranking). Turn it into a tool, name it and voice it in the creator's own words and in-jokes, fill the content before launch (import public place data first; where its points came from isn't verified), make the "first review" a reward, and put the names of fans who suggested things in the changelog. If you want to build in the toilet space, the opening is in what it doesn't do: photos, use while traveling abroad, multiple languages. But that needs a different acquisition channel.

How to get users: a creator's launch video plus on-stream mentions, and in the first week push hard to top the overall chart in one small-language country. A few hundred ratings in Hungary can get you #1, and #1 brings organic traffic from media and category pages. After that, expand through the diaspora of the same language, and don't rush into the English market.

Timing: Budicheck's wave rode the Halloween horror stream season, and its buzz had already dropped by half within a week. Copying "toilets + streamer" only feels fresh once and can't happen twice in the same country. The structure itself has no window, though, and you can use it anytime, as long as you can find the creator to partner with.

What would show this read is wrong: ① A month or two later, Budicheck still adds dozens of ratings a day, or starts taking business verification and sponsorships. That would mean "a streamer's joke turned into a tool" can become an ongoing business, and the grade could go up. ② A toilet-rating app in another country, without a big streamer behind it, grows on organic traffic. That would mean the category has demand on its own, not only because of people. ③ The reverse: if new installs hit zero within a month, this was just a fan event, and even the playbook's lesson is worth less.