Hit #27 on Egypt's finance Top Grossing chart with only 1 ratings worldwide: Masareef shows that people pay for bank-SMS expense tracking, and also that small charts can mislead

Masareef is an Arabic expense-tracking App built as a side project by a front-end engineer in Egypt working alone; it automatically turns the debit SMS banks send into entries. Two months after launch, in Nov 6 it appeared at #27 on Egypt's App Store finance Top Grossing chart. It looks like it took off, but it has only 1 to 2 ratings worldwide, and that rank was held up by a few subscriptions. Still, those few payments show one thing: people will pay for "no manual logging." It's just that this track in Egypt and the Gulf is already crowded this year.

A person who deleted five expense-tracking Apps

In 2026 Aug 3, Mohamed Gado posted on LinkedIn, opening with:

Over the years I've downloaded five expense-tracking Apps, and I gave up on each one within about two weeks.

The reason was always the same: buy a coffee, open the App, enter the amount, pick a category, save. Several times a day, and people quit; miss a few days and the numbers are wrong, and the budget never gets opened again. He went on: "I always thought it was a discipline problem. It isn't, it's a data-entry problem. My bank sends me a notification for every payment, the information is already on my phone, there was just nothing using it."

Gado lives in Tanta, Egypt, and by day works as a front-end developer at Tarmeez Capital, a Saudi Islamic-bond (sukuk) investment platform. Masareef is his side project; the Arabic word "مصاريف" means "expenses." The Android version came first, and in Sep 4 it reached the App Store.

What it is

An expense-tracking App built on "the bank logs it for you": you swipe your card, transfer money, top up a wallet, or withdraw cash at an ATM, and the bank's alerts are automatically parsed into amount, merchant, and account, then written into the ledger. Entries it's unsure about don't go in directly; they go into a pending inbox to confirm.

The two platforms work differently, because the systems don't allow the same thing:

• Android: reads push notifications from banks' Apps; no SMS permission needed.
• iPhone: Apple doesn't let Apps read other Apps' notifications or SMS, so the only route is for the user to set up a "when message is received" automation in Shortcuts and forward the bank's SMS to Masareef. It provides step-by-step guidance, with a test button at each step, alerts when an SMS is caught, and reminders if none has come in for a long time. From iOS 27 onward, Shortcuts added a "notification" trigger, and it used that to catch bank App push notifications too, choosing at most 30 of the most-used bank Apps per country.

He wrote up these pitfalls in a long-form article on the website, labeled "51-minute read."

The feature list is outrageously long: budgets, a multi-currency wallet, gam'eya (the rotating savings circles Egyptians use), zakat, gold and silver counted toward net worth, how much you can still spend before payday, shared ledgers, split bills, and five AI assistants. The website says it supports 1,203 banks and wallets across 111 countries; in Sep 5 his LinkedIn post still said 413 banks, so it nearly tripled in two months. The version went from 1.0 to 1.147 in two months.

How it reached #27

First, how many users it has.

Now look at how low that chart is. In Nov 6, among the apps ranked #15 to #40 on Egypt's finance Top Grossing chart, most have only 0 to 1 ratings in Egypt: YNAB has the 19,9th-most ratings; DAZU is #23 and Subscription Tracker #25, each with 0 ratings; Brim is #30,1 by ratings. On a category chart this small, a few subscriptions a day, or one or two lifetime purchases, is enough to reach the top 30.

The timing lines up (inferred): the official site listed the lifetime plan as "$99.99 before Oct 27", then it dropped to $79.99. The day after, on Oct 28, it first showed up on the Saudi chart, at #46. The 1.146 release on Nov 5 had a first update note reading "buy Pro directly on the App Store page," and the next day it charted at #27 in Egypt. A handful of $79.99 purchases carries real weight on charts like these, which is enough to explain the spike-then-fade curve.

So the honest answer is: it hasn't taken off yet. There are payments, but the volume is small; by the chart thresholds, daily revenue is roughly in the single digits to tens of dollars (estimated).

Where the money comes from

The free version isn't a trial: manual logging, wallets, and budgets can be used forever, and auto-logging gives 25 entries a month. Past 25 entries you need to buy Pro:

All payments go through Apple and Google in-app purchase, with no ads. The design is clever: someone who swipes their card several times a day uses up 25 entries in roughly one to two weeks, right when they've gotten used to not logging by hand.

The only App Store review comes from Saudi Arabia, Sep 27,5 stars:

This App has surpassed the older Apps in this space and is now the best. I only wish monthly budgets could start from each person's payday, set to the day they get paid.

He later did add "month starts on payday". The early paying users look mostly Saudi.

Where users come from

Almost all of it posted by him alone:

• LinkedIn: A run of posts from August to September about the product, and more about the tech (how the cache is capped, how the balance subtracts bills that haven't cleared yet). He has 5,163 followers, but mostly engineers, not people who would download an Arabic expense-tracking app.
• Show HN: Posted Aug 30, 2 points, 0 comments. Indie-dev launch sites like Microlaunch and Peerlist also got submissions, with no visible traction.
• One landing page per bank: This is the most solid move. Under the main site there are Arabic and English pages for Al Rajhi Bank, Saudi National Bank, National Bank of Egypt, Vodafone Cash and others, e.g. "تسجيل مصاريف فودافون كاش تلقائيًا" (automatically log Vodafone Cash expenses). They target long-tail searches like "can [bank] log expenses automatically". How well they work, I don't know.
• Instagram: An official account posts version updates and Shortcuts setup tutorials. I couldn't find follower or engagement numbers.
• Can't find it on TikTok or X, and no ads seen.

There's also a problem: "مصاريف / Masareef" is a generic word. The App Store has at least five or six other apps with this name, so store search gives it almost no traffic that's its own.

Who it's competing with

In 2026, "Arabic + bank SMS auto-tracking" was a crowded wave. It wasn't copying. Several people were building the same thing at the same time, and several launched before it:

Masareef's bank coverage and iOS setup guidance are more detailed than its peers. But what this niche lacks isn't features, it's distribution: Wafeer has old users, Salla owns the keyword, and a pile of same-name apps split the search results.

If it were you

C. Worth learning from, not worth copying. It proves one small thing: in a market where bank SMS is common and open banking APIs haven't spread, people will pay to not log expenses by hand. But it has only a few orders of its own; Egypt and the Gulf already have a dozen similar apps this year, and Saudi Arabia has veteran players like Wafeer. Building another one like it for the same countries has no real opening.

Who it suits: Developers who understand the bank SMS format of a country nobody has covered yet, ideally locals who receive those texts every day. Places like Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Bangladesh and Nigeria have many local banks and wallets but few open banking APIs (inference; I didn't check similar apps in each country). Big markets like India already have established SMS tracking apps, so skip those.

Who it doesn't suit: Anyone hoping to win on features (Masareef's feature list is already maxed out, and it still hasn't gained traction); people who can only write code and can't do content and search; anyone who wants the Gulf or Egypt.

How to build it: Ship Android first, reading bank push notifications, which passes store review more easily. On iPhone, copy its Shortcuts approach with guided setup, a test button at each step, and use the iOS 27 "Notification" trigger. Start by supporting only the 10 to 20 most-used banks and wallets in your country and get parsing right; send anything uncertain to a review queue rather than logging it wrong. For pricing, follow its model: free monthly auto-logging up to a cap, subscription above that, plus a lifetime option.

How to get users: Copy its "one landing page per bank" approach, written in the local language as "how to auto-log [bank / wallet] expenses". Then film 30-second screen videos on TikTok and Instagram, "scan the receipt, the books update themselves", one per bank. Masareef never seriously did either of these; its LinkedIn posts are for engineers.

Why now: The iOS 27 notification trigger just opened up, and most similar apps still only have the SMS route. Before the first half of 2027 ends and the rest of the market catches up, claim the long-tail bank keywords in your country.

What would mean you're wrong: (1) Your country's local bank apps add "spending analysis" themselves, or open banking APIs spread, and the SMS route loses its value; (2) three months after launch, the bank landing pages still aren't bringing organic downloads and daily new installs are single digits; (3) Masareef itself: if at the start of 2027 it still had only a few ratings and only broke into the top charts during lifetime-plan promotions, it means willingness to pay is thinner than it looks.