Beige living room swapped for burgundy curtains: Solavie got 1.78M views from two images, but only 171 paying users

Solavie is an iPhone app where you photograph a room and AI redoes the soft furnishings. It launched in late July and was built by a one-person company. Its TikTok account uses a "then vs. now" two-image carousel, and from 9 to October it posted 4 videos with over 500k views each. The app sits on the Graphics & Design category charts in 20 to 40-plus countries every day. But its own website says it has 171 paying users as of October, and it has only 16 to 24 global ratings. The content approach works and can be copied. The product and business haven't proven themselves yet, and the category is already crowded.

A "how it's going vs how it started" post

In Oct 2026 12, the TikTok account @solavieapp posted a two-image carousel. The first slide reads "how it's going vs how it started": a pink velvet sofa, two zebra-print accent chairs, burgundy floor-to-ceiling curtains, and a purple-pink tassel chandelier, with a portrait of a woman in a cowboy hat on the wall. The second slide shows the same living room: gray-white fabric sofa, light rug, white walls, and two botanical prints, with the caption "thanks to solavie🤍". The soundtrack is "Ayo Technology" by 50 Cent.

Putting the redesign first and the original second is deliberate. By 11-06, this post had 1.78M views, 159k likes and 32k saves (TikTok, 11-06). The second most-liked comment (4,841 likes) says "I read it backwards, I thought the second picture was the redesign," followed by "I almost panicked" and "you scared me." The comments are arguing about taste: "finally someone uses color again," while others say "you killed the soul of it."

The most-liked comment (7,132 likes) points out a flaw: "the wall to the right of the door in the 'after' suddenly got wide enough to fit a whole sideboard." A German user also asked, "did the wall next to the back door get longer?" The app advertises that "walls, windows and floors stay the same," but the AI quietly changed the room's structure, and viewers spotted it at a glance.

The September 25 post uses the same formula: the top reads "how it's going," showing a living room with a green velvet sofa, burgundy accent chair, burgundy curtains and tassel chandelier. The second slide, "how it started," is a beige-sofa, white-rug rental captioned "I did it with solavie." It reached 1.19M views. The most-liked comment (5,080 likes) says "much better, cozier," and the second (2,144 likes) says "so now everyone's color scheme is green with burgundy."

What it is

You photograph a room (stand at the door and capture the whole space) and answer a few questions: which room, what feeling you want, and which furniture to keep. The AI produces a redesign. You can then change one thing with a sentence, like "swap in a brown sofa" or "make the walls warmer." You can also drop a Pinterest image into your own room, or photograph a rug you saw in a store, enter its dimensions, and preview it in your space. The store page lists 40 styles: Warm Minimal, Japandi, Old Money, Chic Parisian, Coastal Hamptons, and more. The app includes a library of 3,423 pieces of furniture and decor. Images are generated with Google Gemini, and planning and checking use Claude (per the website).

Pricing: the first design is free, then it's paid. Weekly $9.99, monthly $29.99, yearly $49.99–59.99, plus credit packs: 150 credits for $5.99 and 500 credits for $16.99. It supports English, French and German, and the app name changes by store: "Room Makeover AI" in the US, "Déco Intérieure IA" in France, and "Interior AI Makeover" elsewhere. This is keyword targeting by region.

The developer, Designpulse LLC, is registered in Wyoming, USA, and this is the only app under its name. The TikTok posts are tagged to Hungary, the "before" photo has European-standard outlets, and the people behind it are most likely in Europe (inference).

Where users come from: a faceless image-post account

Almost entirely TikTok. @solavieapp's first post went up in July 11, more than two weeks before the app launched, to warm up the account. By 11-06 it had 9,244 followers and 165 videos, with 510k likes in total, and the countable video views add up to about 7.3M (the website says "10M+," which can't be verified). It posts 30 to 50 times a month.

The format is almost always the same: a two-image carousel with a trending song. The post captions are only hashtags (#interiordesign #homeinspo #pinterestroom) and never mention the app. The app name only appears in the small line of text on the image, and the profile bio reads "Try it 👇🏻 or Search Solavie on the App Store."

The hits cluster from late September to mid October:

Every post hits the same feeling: people are tired of beige, white, "soulless" rentals and want color, pattern and vintage pieces. A Spanish comment says "I'm also sick of white and beige houses," and an English one reads "thank god people are using color again." The website turned these hits into a section, "every room built around one print": tassels, leopard, plum, cow print, zebra, checkerboard, and tapping any one shows every piece of furniture in that room.

Channels outside TikTok are tiny: a few Pinterest pins, 8 Instagram followers, and a web version. No TikTok ad spend has been found, and whether it advertises on Meta or Google can't be seen (unverified). No press coverage, and nobody has discussed it on X.

Its charts fit this account too. Since the posts are pushed heavily to European users, the rankings concentrate in small Northern and Central European countries (inference). From 10-28 to 11-06, it appeared every day on the Graphics & Design category charts in 24 to 44 stores. Its best rank was #1 Top Grossing in Tunisia (11-02), #7 in Luxembourg, and #15 in Slovenia. In the big markets, its best was #66 on the France Top Free chart, #79 Top Grossing in Germany, and #128 Top Grossing in the UK; it has never charted in the US store (App Store charts). Category charts in small countries have a low bar, so a few subscriptions can push an app to the top. "Charting in 40 countries" sounds impressive but doesn't mean high download volume.

Where the money comes from: lots of views, few payers

The website publishes its own numbers: as of October it had 171 paying members. Among paying members, 50% had changed a rug with a single sentence, 39% a light, 37% a sofa, 25% curtains, and 17% wall color; over a third had used "photograph real items to test them." Around Oct 9, it described itself as "10M+ views and 12k+ room designs." By this measure, roughly one in a thousand views turns into a design, and about 1.4% of designs convert to payment. 11-06 However, the counter on the website's homepage shows much smaller numbers, which don't match up. Treat them only as an order-of-magnitude reference.

171 paying users, weekly, monthly and yearly plans mixed together. Roughly a few thousand USD a month (estimate, no public revenue to check). Global ratings 16 to 24; 10 new ratings a day over the last 0 to 2 days. US store 4 ratings, average 3.0 stars; UK store 8 ratings, 4.0 stars (App Store, 11-06).

Back in October, its payment flow also had a meltdown. 10-28 A one-star review in the US store said a full-screen subscription popup blocked everything, the credits they bought wouldn't work, and their email to support bounced back. 10-27 Another one-star review from Australia read: "paid, then got a timeout error for the whole generation... complete scam." The developer 11-02 shipped 1.2.5 to fix it, but whether conversion recovered afterward isn't visible from the outside.

One more signal worth noting. In the comments on the hit posts, the most common questions were "where did you buy that ceiling lamp?", "these colors are impossible to find on Amazon", and "I don't want to buy new furniture, where do I start?" The viewers want to "buy the look," not necessarily "see another picture."

Who it's competing with

In the past 2026 years, roughly 151 newly listed US-store apps have "interior," "room design," "home design" or "room makeover" in their names. "Photo-to-redesign" is a feature everyone has, and general models can do it directly; on Reddit people already say "ChatGPT is enough." What Solavie really does differently is the content: not "AI helps you decorate" but "a beige rental turned into a Pinterest room with prints and color," aimed at young women scrolling home inspiration on TikTok, not homeowners who need renovations. I haven't seen anyone else copy that content formula specifically.

If it were you

Verdict: C. There's something to learn, but building an "AI room makeover" app to copy it isn't worth it. What's worth learning is its content formula, not the product. The category already has hundreds of similar apps and several paid-acquisition giants, and ChatGPT does it for free. Even with several million views of its own, Solavie has only 171 paying users to show for it.

Who it suits: a small team of 1 to 2 people who can make images every day and have a feel for a particular home-decor aesthetic, ideally with an existing product to promote, who need a face-free content format they can post daily.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone hoping to earn subscription money from an "AI interior design app" alone; anyone unwilling to create content and relying on organic store traffic; anyone targeting the big English-speaking US market, which belongs to Home AI and Arch-style paid-acquisition companies.

How to do it: three paths, ranked by how worth it they are.

• One: use this "then vs. before" two-image carousel to promote other things: balconies, gardens, wardrobes, wedding decor, nails, hair color. As long as AI can produce an "after" people want to save.
• Two: do the half it hasn't done well. The comments ask "where do I buy it," so make the furniture in each makeover real, buyable items, with links to IKEA, Amazon or local furniture stores, earning commission rather than charging a subscription. Or build a web version, generate free and then sell credits (inference: more likely than a $9.99 weekly subscription to get TikTok scrollers to pay).
• Three: switch languages. German, French, Italian or Polish home accounts, using houses locals recognize (European apartments, rental flats) and furniture they can actually buy locally.

Technically, do one step more than it does: after generating, check whether walls, doors and windows stayed where they were. The top comment on its best post is about exactly that flaw.

How to get users: open a brand account and post for two or three weeks before launch. Each post has only two images: the finished makeover captioned "how it's going," and the plain rental before the change captioned "how it started," with a line of small text naming the product. Captions carry only hashtags; the profile says "search XX in the store." Build topics around one specific print or color scheme (zebra, leopard, green with burgundy, tassel lamps) as a series, rather than vaguely saying "AI redoes your room." Pull the viral rooms back to the website and make them a "hit rooms" section.

When to start, before: get the account warmed up before late December. January is when people do "new year, new home" and reshuffle soft furnishings (inference), and the "back from beige to color" trend has lasted a year or two; once it passes, all that's left is a format people are tired of.

Signs you've misjudged it: ① more than 60 posts in a row without a single one passing 100k views; ② a post goes viral, but the people who visit the profile and search the store are still only in the thousandths, meaning this content earns saves, not downloads; ③ ChatGPT or Gemini launches a dedicated "redo my room" entry point and it starts getting posted everywhere on TikTok, at which point the tool layer has no value left; ④ the other way round: if Solavie's paid web members grow past 500 by January, it shows the path converts, and the rating should be raised.