#7,0 bestseller in Ireland, rated: a "protected-area appendix" app built by one person for ecological consultants

Merestone is an iOS app built by a solo developer in the UK. You drop a pin on a map and draw a circle, and it lists the nearby nature reserves, habitats, flood zones and heritage sites by distance and direction, as a dated PDF that ecologists can paste straight into a report as an appendix. Two months after launch it has reached 40 countries in 26 languages, hit #7 on the Ireland Reference Top Grossing chart in Nov 6, and still has zero ratings worldwide. This piece covers what it actually sells, what that #7 spot is worth, who else is squeezed into this gap, and whether you should jump in.

Oct 24 added Denmark, and by Oct 30 it had charted in Denmark.

On 2026 Oct 24, Leon Figueira shipped version 2.11 of Merestone. The first line of the release notes reads: "Denmark · 39 layers, with a Danish interface and Danish reports." That's 39 layers, a Danish UI, and Danish reports. Six days later it reached #209 on the Denmark App Store Reference free chart, and in Nov it climbed to #108 (1).

Three days later, another update. 2.12 (10-27) added 15 countries in one go: Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, the Baltic states, Iceland and Liechtenstein, with 12 more languages across the app and PDFs. 2.13 (10-31) had just one item in its notes: "New App Store pictures and texts for every country and region," meaning the store screenshots and copy were redone for every market. Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong and Brazil followed (Ireland App Store version history, 11-06).

It launched in Sep 1 and passed 2.13 releases within two months, shipping three or four versions a week. The seller on the store page is an individual in Stoke-on-Trent, and the website says "made in the United Kingdom by Leon Figueira, sole trader" (merestonemaps.com, 11-06).

It sells a page of an appendix, not a map

Before developing a site in the UK, ecology consultants run a desk study: a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal (PEA), a baseline for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG, mandatory since 2024), or a habitats regulations screening (HRA; called AA in Ireland). Each one has a section on "designated sites nearby": how many SSSIs, SACs, SPAs and Ramsar wetlands lie within how many metres, and in which direction.

There were two traditional routes. One was to dig through government web maps yourself. In England that's Defra's MAGIC, with over four hundred layers. It's free, but view-only, and it doesn't produce a results table. A planning-tools company wrote on its Nov 3 blog that a thorough check takes about 20 minutes (planninglabs.co.uk). The other route was to pay a county Environmental Records Centre for a search. TVERC, for example, charges a £86 base fee plus a dataset fee, and you wait several working days (tverc.org).

Merestone's store description says what it is in its first sentence:

Merestone runs the designated sites search of a desk study (PEA, BNG baseline, HRA or AA screening) and writes the appendix: drop a pin, set a radius, get a dated PDF with results by distance and direction.

It plugs each country's official publisher services directly into the app. The site says 2425 layers, 262 of them free, each layer labelled with its licence, and each protected area shown under its national legal name. The PDF lists distance, direction, source and the date the data was pulled, and it even records "searched but empty" and "layer failed to load." That's built for a report that someone may audit later. It's also blunt about what it doesn't do: "Not a field survey, a LERC search or an authority's statement." There are no Local Wildlife Sites yet, and species records are limited to GBIF bird data as a reference.

Native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. Layers can be downloaded for offline use in the field.

Where the money comes from: one-time purchase per country, or £8.99 a month

The free tier gives one core set of protected areas per country with a 250 m search radius. For PDFs, a larger radius and offline downloads, you pay, through two routes:

Web payments go through Stripe, and accounts sync with in-app purchases. A country bought in the app also unlocks when you log in on the web.

For a consultant, a €29.99 one-time purchase for one country pays for itself with a single report. That's the basis for it earning money at all.

What that #7 spot is worth

Here are all the charts it has appeared on (App Store category charts, 10-30 to 11-06):

Every store shows 0 ratings, it has never charted on any overall chart, and it isn't on the UK chart.

On the Ireland Reference Top Grossing chart, 11-06 sits ahead of it: Ancestry, Hallow, MyHeritage and a few AI translators, with coin-identification apps below. That chart has a very low bar in Ireland, and its Irish one-time purchase is €29.99. Going from #26 to #7 most likely means one or two Irish consultants bought a copy each (inference).

So the accurate read is that it has started taking payments, but at single-digit volume. This is a product just starting to show up, not one that's scaling.

Where users come from

• App Store search, plus per-country localised store pages. This is the only channel with visible results. Each store uses the local name for the title: the Portuguese store calls it "Merestone: Áreas Classificadas," and the US store has shown "Merestone: Protected Areas App." Its charting in Denmark, Ireland and Portugal all came after the 10-24 to 10-31 rounds of country additions and store-page work. The timing lines up, but that doesn't prove cause.
• A page on the website for each layer. Every layer has its own landing page under merestonemaps.com/layers/ (for example the UK SAC layer, or Spain's landslide layer), and they rank well for searches like "app for ecologists to check designated sites." How much traffic they bring is unknown.
• Social, community, press: none found. Its name doesn't turn up on X in the last 90 days, and there are no Reddit, LinkedIn or CIEEM (the ecology professional body) posts or write-ups. I saw no evidence of ads either, but not finding it doesn't mean none were run.
• The same developer's other apps. This account shipped roughly 9 apps in two months. GainScout: BNG Land Finder also targets BNG, so the two can share a little audience. Another one, Runlow (an AI usage meter), has charted in paid categories in small storefronts like Tanzania, Ghana and Luxembourg. "Lots of small apps, surfacing on small-country charts" looks like this developer's habitual playbook (inference).

Who it's competing with

A fair number of people have moved into this gap in 2026, most of them web tools built with AI and covering only the UK:

Of this lot, Merestone is the only one that is a native app, covers 40 countries, works offline and outputs PDFs in local languages. But in the UK itself, the cheaper EcoCheck, which includes species records, is closer to what consultants actually use, and Merestone has no visible UK traction yet. Where it's surfacing is outside the UK, in small countries that lack that cluster of web tools.

If it were you

C: You can learn a playbook from this, but copying it isn't worth it. Ecology consultants are a very narrow audience, the UK already has five or six similar tools crowding in, and Merestone itself is still at single-digit volume. The work of covering 40 countries and 2425 layers in two months is hard for a latecomer to beat. What's worth taking away is the method, not the category.

Who it's for: indie devs who've worked in a compliance-heavy field (ecology, urban planning, environmental review, construction, fire safety, food) and know which page of the report is the real grind, or who already ship apps for small countries and small-language markets and want a B2B niche that can sell a €20–40 one-time purchase.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants to go head-to-head with UK ecology consultancies (MAGIC is free, EcoCheck is £4.99/month, and several AI web tools are already in the field); anyone who doesn't know the industry and can't write the detail of "list the empty results too"; anyone counting on social media to grow this (that audience isn't on TikTok).

How to do it: find another compliance process, and copy the model. Look for a standard appendix that regulation makes mandatory for every project. Find open government data you can legally use commercially. Build a native app that goes from pin to a PDF with sources and dates. Give away the core layer for free, sell one-time purchases per country or region, and offer a monthly subscription for users who work across borders. If you do want to go into ecology, build what it explicitly doesn't have: Local Wildlife Sites, species records, and species data for countries outside the UK. But confirm the data licence allows commercial use first.

How to get users: localize the store page country by country, and use the local legal terms as keywords in the titles (its Portuguese-store title is "Áreas Classificadas"). Build a landing page for each data layer on the website. Start with small countries that have no web tools of the same kind yet, like Ireland, Denmark and the Baltics, where the category charts are easy to get into. One or two purchases can be enough to chart.

When to move: no rush. This is a slow market with no window. If you're going to build it, do it now, while AI can still help you connect data and translate in bulk and not everyone else has it yet.

Signs you're reading it wrong: ① Merestone shows up on the UK Reference Top Grossing chart before Q1 2027, or its ratings climb into double digits. That would mean UK consultants are paying too, the audience is bigger than it looks, and it's worth raising the estimate. ② The other way: if by year end Ireland and Denmark rankings all disappear and no new country charts, those purchases were a fluke, and even this playbook is less effective than it looked. ③ If UK web tools like EcoCheck or Ecorva start going multi-country and shipping apps, someone else has spotted the same opportunity, and the gap is narrowing.