3 500 forints for a three-person dinner? A weekly meal-planning app built on real shelf prices from Hungarian supermarkets hit No. 1 on the local food Top Grossing chart

NomNom launched on iPhone in Jul 23. It plans your dinners for the week and turns every ingredient into one shopping list. Dozens of apps like this showed up this summer, almost all in English and all aimed at the US. NomNom took a different route: it's in Hungarian, it matches every ingredient to real shelf prices at Aldi, Lidl, Tesco and Spar, and it tells you "what this week's dinners cost in total." By Nov 6 it had 913 ratings in Hungary and 13 in the US. Since Nov 1, it has mostly sat at 1 on the Hungarian App Store's Food & Drink Top Grossing chart. A niche that's saturated in English can still work in a small country where food prices make the news and official price data is public. Nobody has copied this yet.

A Budapest blogger spent 4 072 HUF on groceries

In early October, Instagram creator anastasia.budapesten posted a Reel opening with: "Can dinner for three be made for 3 500 HUF? NomNom says yes, so I tested it."

The app first gave her a shopping list and estimated cost: 3 360 HUF. At the store she actually paid 4 072 HUF. "I bought a bit more than the app calculated, but I think the result is great." She made stuffed eggplant with minced beef: three eggplants, 480 g of beef mince, 105 g of mozzarella, with the full recipe in the caption. Closing line: "NomNom offers a free trial of 7 days. It makes weekly menus, shopping lists and price estimates." The last tag is #reklám, Hungarian for "advertisement."

The video sells the whole product: not recipes, but knowing in advance what a meal will cost. The three pain points on the Hungarian homepage say the same thing: "It's six in the evening and you're hungry, and the fridge is empty," "The bill is always higher than you expected," "Recipe apps don't know the prices."

What it is and how it charges

You choose how many days to plan, how many people eat, which supermarket you shop at, what cookware you have, and any dietary restrictions. It builds a week of dinners, shows the cost per serving and for the whole week, and sorts the shopping list in supermarket shelf order. The Hungarian store subtitle is "Heti vacsoraterv valódi bolti árakból" (a weekly dinner plan from real store prices). The store description is clear: Hungarian prices come from those four supermarkets, and other countries use official food price statistics to estimate.

It has a hard paywall: nothing works without a subscription. Annual is 7 990 HUF (about $22) with a 7-day trial. Monthly is 1 490 HUF, no trial. There is an Android version with 1K+ downloads on Google Play (11-06), but the focus is iPhone.

The developer, Neo App Labs, has two other apps: a Greek/Hebrew Bible tool and Earn, a creator-gig platform. It looks like a studio that builds multilingual small apps; which country it operates from is unclear.

Why Hungary

People here calculate their grocery bills every day. From 2022 to 2023, Hungary's food inflation was among the highest in the EU. In Jul 2023, the government launched Árfigyelő, the official price comparison site run by the Competition Authority (GVH), which publishes prices store by store. From 1, retail gross margins were capped; in April this year the cap was made indefinite, and in October the media began discussing how price tags would change if it were lifted (portfolio.hu, 2025). In Hungary, "how much groceries cost this week" is a news topic, not just a household chore. 10-19

Real prices already exist as data. NomNom's website says its price data comes from Árfigyelő and the supermarkets' product catalogs. The government already publishes store-level prices, and NomNom just attaches those prices to every ingredient in each recipe, which is why it can claim "valódi polcárak" (real shelf prices). English competitors can only offer estimates, and NomNom itself estimates outside Hungary.

The chart bar is low. On the same day, the Hungarian Food & Drink Top Grossing chart had mise at #3, with 35 ratings in Hungary, and Disha at #12 with 0. A few hundred paying users can hold a spot near #1 for a long time. Third-party estimates put its global monthly revenue at about $6 000 and monthly downloads at about 8 000 (unverified), which fits: the top spot is real, but the money is small.

The control group tells the story. Same product, same approach: 13 ratings in the US store. A batch of English TikTok videos with nearly identical captions ("okay this app just did my whole meal plan for me. nomnom, on the app store…") got only a hundred or two to a few hundred views. In the US it's one of dozens of similar apps; in Hungary it's the only one.

Where users come from

Paid promotion by a local micro-creator, confirmed. The Reel above is one example. The format is "challenge + real receipt + full recipe," with suspense and a result, which suits Reels naturally.

The developer runs its own creator-sourcing platform. The same developer launched "Earn: UGC Creator Jobs" in Sep 29, which connects brands with short-video work at posted rates of $60 to $180 per video, plus a "campaign account" model where creators open a new account for a single campaign and post on it continuously. Finding creators to film videos is something this company does in-house, and it keeps the cost per video low.

Paid ads, running, scale unknown. The website FAQ says, "If you came through an ad, we send clicks back to the ad platform to measure whether it's worth it," and download links carry source parameters. A Facebook page with the same name has 1 followers but shows "95 people talking about this," which looks like a page used mainly to host ads.

Store search. The Hungarian and US listings have separate titles and subtitles. Almost nobody competes for this category in Hungarian.

4.8 stars, reviews are mixed

Of the 913 ratings, only about a dozen have written text, and 4 of them are one-star. The complaints were:

• "Too bad it's paid. You could at least make some basic features free. Right now you can't use anything without paying." (10-27)
• "It's the same 10 dishes over and over. Many dishes have no recipe. Very basic." (9-16)
• "AI slop meals, no added value at all." (9-13)
• "The recipes are unreadable, AI-written, pointless. The cooking times don't add up either." (9-02)
• "Give me a breakfast option. Does it think I'm a squirrel?" (8-11)

Most of the positive reviews are just a word or two, and the star ratings are most likely pulled from the in-app rating prompt (inference). There are also thoughtful five-star reviews: "It saved me the mental load and stress of deciding what to cook today. Paying is normal, everything in life costs money, and not paying means paying with your data, so at least this is transparent." Another was titled "How have I never heard of this???"

The team listened. The Nov 4 release notes for version 1.1.2 added halal, kosher and nut-free options, let you exclude meats and fish you don't eat, added more local dishes to the menus, made new plans avoid meals from the last four weeks, and added a field: "Can't find the supermarket you usually shop at? Enter the name and we'll know where to expand next."

Also note that daily ratings went from an average of about 9 per day after launch down to about 3.5 per day over the last ten days. The acquisition peak was from 8 to October, and the chart position now rests mainly on existing subscribers.

Who it's competing with

Many apps do weekly meal plans. Only NomNom, so far, does "local language + real local supermarket prices," and only in Hungary.

If it were you

Verdict: worth trying, but don't copy the Hungary play exactly. What's worth copying is the method: take a weekly meal-plan product that works in English, move it to a small-language country with public official price data and price-sensitive consumers, and use real shelf prices as the selling point. The weakness is the ceiling. Hungary's top spot is only a few thousand dollars a month (estimated), which can't support a team in one country. You'd need several countries.

Good fit for: small teams that can build multilingual apps and connect price data country by country; people who can find local micro-creators and get a video made for a few dozen dollars.

Bad fit for: anyone aiming for a big-market hit; anyone who only works in English and can't work with local creators; anyone who thinks recipes can be fully AI-generated. Half of NomNom's bad reviews are about this.

How to do it:

1. Pick countries first. The criteria: official or mandatory public store-level price data, no existing local-language competitor, and food prices as a news topic. Candidates: Croatia (the government has required retailers to publish prices daily since 2025), Greece (e-katanalotis), Romania (Monitorul Prețurilor), Slovenia, Portugal. Whether each country's data is usable and how to license it you'll have to check yourself (unverified).
2. Match prices to specific products so you can say "this week's dinners cost X, at [specific supermarket]'s shelf prices." Don't use estimates. Without real prices you're just another English reskin.
3. Fix what NomNom gets criticized for: have locals write or proofread the recipes, with hundreds of dishes and no repeats; give a free tier (for example, free access to the first week's menu and total cost, with subscription unlocking shopping lists and full recipes), instead of a paywall at the door.
4. Follow its pricing structure: annual with a 7-day trial, monthly without one.

How to acquire users: shoot the same kind of Reel: "Can X forints feed N people for dinner?" Compare the app's estimate with the receipt, then give the full recipe and a trial. Work with local mid-sized creators, disclose the ads, and run several of them. Add Meta ads with landing pages in the local language. Write the store title and subtitle in the local language to make "weekly dinner plan + real supermarket prices" clear.

How urgent: the sooner the better, ideally within about six months. NomNom's own website already lists other countries, and its release notes ask "which supermarket do you usually shop at?" It's looking for its next country. If multilingual players like mise connect local prices, the openings in small countries will close.

Signs you've misread it: ① NomNom's top grossing rank drops out of Hungary's top 10 Food & Drink apps in the next month or two. That would mean trial-to-paid conversion isn't sustaining revenue and real prices only drive acquisition, not retention. ② NomNom or mise launches real-price versions in Croatia or Romania first. That would mean the window has already closed. Then you either pick a colder country or drop the idea.

Data and sources

• Ratings, rankings, store descriptions, release notes, user reviews: App Store Hungary and US storefronts, 10-28 to 11-06; Google Play store page, 11-06.
• Creator video: Instagram Reel from anastasia.budapesten (around early October, tagged #reklám).
• Website and FAQ: nomnomplanner.com (Hungarian and English pages). Earn platform: App Store and earnbycontent.com.
• English TikTok videos: August 20 to 22 and October; views as of 11-06.
• Hungarian price policy: GVH Árfigyelő (launched 2023-07-01); retail margin cap: index.hu (2026-02-13), portfolio.hu (2026-10-19).
• Monthly revenue and downloads are third-party estimates, unverified.