A 58-second TikTok and a "recognizable" Kabsa rig: the flashcard app a Saudi influencer built himself

A creator who teaches people to "make money online" built an Arabic AI photo food logger plus fitness app and posted one TikTok. In ten days its ratings went from 4 to over 60, and it charted in the top 40 of the Saudi Health & Fitness Top Free chart. The product is well made, but the rise came from his own 500k followers rather than the product, and five or six players in Saudi Arabia are already charging for this. Below: what it is, how it makes money, who it competes with, and what you can take from it.

One video, and the first question below

On 2026 Oct 27, the TikTok account @econabdallah posted a 58-second video with one line of caption: "جربو تطبيق Grams رهيب", meaning "Try the Grams app, it's amazing." The account belongs to Abdullah Alfouzan (عبدالله الفوزان), who usually posts about "money makes you crazy" and "Claude and Twitter" style online-income content. He has about 210k TikTok followers, about 570k on X, and about 310k YouTube subscribers. As of 11-06 the video had 277k views and 541 likes. It's the only post he's had over 10k views since September.

The most-liked comment under the video reads: "بفلوس ولا مجاني؟", meaning "Is it paid or free?" The next few are similar: "A subscription?", "I want it completely free", "It can't be as accurate as a scale". One even says "Try Kalee, it's really good."

At the same time he posted at least three tweets on X: "Snap your meal 📸, AI counts the calories... download Grams now... 7 days free (card required)." None of these posts used the #اعلان (ad) tag he normally uses for sponsored content. The developer name on the App Store is also Abdullah Alfouzan, so it's safe to conclude (inference, high confidence) that this is his own app.

What it is

Grams — Train & Eat, iPhone app, listed 2026-09-17. In one line: snap a photo of your food and it tells you how many calories it has, plus a fitness plan with a demo video for every exercise. Works in Arabic and English.

The line it most wants people to remember (verbatim from the website grams.fit):

صوّر صحنك. يعرف إنها كبسة. — Snap your plate. It knows it's kabsa.

What this means: most calorie-tracking apps break a kabsa (the spiced chicken rice dish from the Gulf) into "rice + chicken" to estimate it. Grams hand-built a table of 52 Gulf and Levantine dishes, recognizes it as "كبسة دجاج 540 ", and pulls the calories from that table, so the same dish gives the same result every time you photograph it. What the website lists: 18 training plans, 62 exercises with videos, and 551 foods. Some details show it's built for locals: exercise videos come in men's and women's versions, there are women's plans and Ramadan plans, dietary preferences include halal, and the whole interface runs right to left in Arabic, not an English app with a translated button. Calorie targets use the Mifflin-St Jeor formula, and the site makes a point of saying "AI doesn't touch these numbers."

The developer updates often. 10-26's version 1.2 raised free photo scans from 5 to 100, added streak tracking and an invite-referral reward. 10-28 a user in the Saudi store complained that goals couldn't be changed after signing up, and 11-04's version 1.4 fixed it. The Saudi store rating is 11-06 4.53.

Where the money comes from

A hard paywall, the Cal AI model. New users get a 7-day free trial, which is for the annual subscription. It requires a card and auto-renews at the end. Saudi store prices (App Store page, 11-06):

So far it has never charted on any Saudi chart (neither Top Grossing overall nor the Health & Fitness category), and how much it earns isn't visible from outside. Half the comments under the video are asking whether it costs money, which suggests a good share of these users came in for "free". How much the trial-to-paid conversion discount is, we don't know yet.

Why now: see the curve

Saudi store numbers (App Store daily data):

10-27 posted the video, 10-30 started moving, and from 11-03 onward it got 9 to 14 new ratings a day. In the six weeks before that it had only 4 ratings. The product itself didn't change much; what changed is that the founder started promoting it. Oman, Yemen and Qatar also reached their free charts, but their ratings there are all 0. Small-country charts have low thresholds, so that signals little.

Another number worth noting: in Saudi Arabia, around ten new ratings a day is enough to reach the top 40 of the Health & Fitness Top Free chart. The bar is low. A person with a few hundred thousand local followers can get a new app there with a single video.

Who it's competing with

Plenty. Saudi "Arabic AI food logging" is not empty ground. It's a category where people are already making money (Saudi Health & Fitness Top Grossing, 11-06):

Grams isn't the first and isn't the biggest. Its Gulf dish table, male/female videos and Ramadan plan are better executed in the details, but Kilo is also pitching "Saudi food", and Miran has long offered food logging plus training in one app. Even under its own video, people recommend Kalee.

Can you follow it?

First, the part you can't copy: this app took off because its maker is already a traffic source. An app with just 7 ratings in its first 4 weeks got pushed onto a chart by one of his videos. If you build an identical app without a Saudi account with 500k followers, you'll most likely get what it looked like in its first six weeks.

Three things you can learn:

1. Localize the food, not just the interface. "Recognizes kabsa" is a line you can drop straight into an ad, and it's far stronger than "supports Arabic". The same holds elsewhere: Indonesia's nasi padang, Turkey's pide, Nigeria's jollof. Generic AI food loggers estimate these badly, and users know it.
2. Use a database and formulas for numbers; let the AI only identify the food. The most common objection in the comments is "It can't be as accurate as a scale", and Grams' answer is "same plate, same result every time". That's a good way to handle this kind of skepticism.
3. Creators building their own product. If you already have a niche audience (fitness, fat loss, new moms), this is the cheapest cold start: one video, no ad spend. Kilo's price list has an "influencer offer" tier, which suggests that in this market, people without built-in traffic pay creators to promote them.

If it were you

C: worth learning from, not worth copying. It got traction from the founder's own followers, which you won't have. In Saudi Arabia the category already has Kalee and Mezan collecting money, and latecomers include Kilo and Mowzon.

Who it suits: creators who already have a local fitness or fat-loss audience (tens of thousands of followers or more) and can ship a decent app; or people from a market where generic AI food logging misses local dishes, who are willing to hand-build a local dish table.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone aiming at Saudi or Gulf Arabic food logging (it's crowded, with five or six local players in the top 30 of Top Grossing); people with no audience who can only code (this kind of app can be built in a week, the hard part is getting it seen); anyone relying on free users (this category runs on a hard paywall, and half the comments are asking if it costs money).

How to do it: pick a language market with a complex local cuisine that Cal AI and the rest haven't seriously tackled. First check whether the top 30 of that country's Health & Fitness Top Grossing already includes local food-logging apps. If there are two or more, pick another market. Hand-build a calorie table of a couple hundred local dishes, let the photo recognition only identify the dish, and take the numbers from the table. Use a 7-day trial plus annual subscription, with the annual price matched to the local leader.

How to acquire users: promote it yourself if you have an account. If not, find mid-tier local fitness and fat-loss creators and give them exclusive promo codes (modeled on Kilo's "influencer offer" tier). The creative is one shot: film a local dish, and on screen the app shows the correct dish name and calories.

When to launch by: there's no hard deadline, but if you're targeting a Muslim market, launching before Ramadan 2027 (starting around early February) is worth it. Ramadan and post-Ramadan fat loss are one of the best windows of the year (inference).

What would show this read was wrong: ① Grams enters the top 30 of the Saudi Health & Fitness Top Grossing before late November and the founder stops promoting it. That would show the product itself retains users and earns money, which makes it more worth following than the current read suggests. ② Conversely, if its daily new ratings fall back to 1–3 within two weeks of him stopping posts, this was a one-off promotional spike, and even the "creator builds his own app" angle needs discounting. ③ He publicly discloses Grams' revenue in a course or thread. Once many people know, the playbook gets even more crowded in the Gulf.

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Data and sources: Saudi App Store daily chart and rating counts (10-28 to 11-06); App Store product page and lookup (11-06, rating 4.53, price, version history); Saudi user reviews (10-28, 10-29); official site grams.fit (11-06); TikTok @econabdallah video and comments (11-06); X @econabdullah public posts; competitor prices from the Saudi store pages of Kalee and Kilo (11-06). That the developer and the creator are the same person and that the Ramadan window is an inference are noted; whether paid ads were used has not been verified.