One 11.8M-view video fed three rivals: the UK "supermarket budget dinner plan" app Herbi

Herbi is a dinner-planning app built by two UK 2000-year-olds. Enter the supermarkets you shop at and a weekly budget, and it plans Monday-to-Friday dinners and a shopping list. It ranks #4 in the UK Google Play Food & Drink Top Grossing chart with only 25k installs. It grew by having its founders make TikTok videos, and the one video that blew up also handed rivals the business's roadmap. Below: how it started, how it charges, who is moving faster, and whether you can still follow.

A video that goes "this can't be real"

In Jun 1 2026, the TikTok account @herbi.app posted a 61-second vertical video captioned only "WAITLIST IS ON MY PAGE GUYS," tagged #aldi #foodshop #mealplan.

The person in the video scrolls their phone and says: "No way, is this real? Someone made an app where you pick where you shop, I pick Aldi. You set a budget for the week's dinners, I put in £35. You choose a style: quick, high-protein, takeaway-style. You tell it what's in your kitchen: microwave, air fryer. In 30 seconds it has planned Monday to Friday, all under £35: BBQ chicken, baked potatoes, flatbreads, Nando's-style chicken. Each dish has ingredients and method, you can swap any you don't like, and at the end you get a whole week's shopping list. Insane."

By Nov 6, the video had 11.8M views and 850k likes. The two most-liked comments were "you're definitely the person who made this app 😭" (69k likes) and "tell me when it's out!!!" (26k likes). The third most-liked comment is telling too: "this is definitely locked behind a ton of paywalls" (3,800 likes).

The video uses the most common hook in UGC ads: pretending to be a user who just discovered the product. The person who made it does this for a living.

Who is behind it

UK company records (Companies House) show the developer, Tempo Labs Creative Ltd, was registered in Jun 3, two days after the video blew up. Both directors were born in 2000: Louie Humble (Manchester) and Kacper Najder (Wilmslow). Louie's LinkedIn bio reads "making consumer apps go viral | 500M+ organic views" and claims he has driven hundreds of millions of views for UGC ad accounts for apps such as GPTZero and Blaze AI.

In other words, Herbi didn't start with a cook solving a problem. A person who makes viral videos tested a topic first: the video showed a working prototype, and the company and store listing followed only after the response came in. The iOS version launched in Jun 16; the Android version didn't arrive until Sep 11.

What it sells and how it gets paid

The feature in one line: supermarket + weekly budget + dietary restrictions + kitchen equipment + household size → a week of dinners and a shelf-ordered shopping list, and you can import recipes you saw on TikTok or Instagram.

It charges hard. On opening, the app asks a long series of questions (budget, supermarkets, dietary restrictions, equipment, household size, days to plan), then asks you to create an account, then shows a paywall straight away, with no free tier. The in-app purchases listed on Google Play run $7.49–$44.99. On the US App Store it's an annual plan at $39.99 (discounted to $29.99) and a monthly plan discounted to $9.99.

The effect of this design is clear in the charts. 11-06 It ranks only #18–25 in the UK Google Play Food & Drink Top Free chart, but has stayed at #2–4 in Top Grossing (UK Google Play charts, 10-29 to 11-06). Few people install, but a high share of those who do pay. Third-party estimates put monthly revenue at $15k to $40k; this hasn't been verified.

The cost shows up in the reviews too. Some one-star reviews from UK users in late October:

"Walks you through a huge form, takes your email password to create an account, then — bam, pay! Not even a free version" — Google Play UK, 10-28

"The app says it's free, then makes you sign up and pay before you can use it. Don't download." — Google Play UK, 10-30

"We really like it, but payment keeps failing: you jump to your banking app to confirm, come back, and the app just..." — Google Play UK, 10-31,2 stars

Two more say it crashes or "stops responding halfway through." Ratings went from 10-29 to 117 reviews, rising to 11-06 with 150 reviews; iOS UK has 259 ratings with an average of 4.25.

Where users come from

Almost all of its growth came from its own TikTok accounts, and that is weakening.

(Data: @herbi.app profile posts, 11-06; the account has 41k followers.)

The last tactic is worth noting: the recipe videos are themselves the app's input. Users "share this video to Herbi" and it goes into their own weekly plan, so the content both acquires new users and drives retention. But views have dropped from hundreds of thousands in August to a few hundred or thousand now. Its own accounts are no longer a reliable engine.

So where are Herbi's 7,530 new Play installs a week (17,455 → 24,985,10-29 through 11-06) coming from? Most likely pent-up demand from the Android version launching three months after iOS. TikTok comments kept asking for an Android app, plus store search (inferred). It doesn't appear to run TikTok ads in Europe, and the Meta ad library shows nothing. Apple Search Ads and Google App Ads are invisible from the outside. Creator partnerships only turned up a few small accounts with a few hundred views each.

Who moved faster

Herbi lit the fuse, but it isn't the biggest in this wave.

Jun 10, 9 days after the video blew up, a near-identical app called mise launched on iOS. Jun 12, Whipp followed. On the day mise launched, someone posted about it on LinkedIn: "A founder posted an idea for a budget dinner-planning app on TikTok. The app didn't exist yet, and the video got 10M+ views. Great validation, right? Not necessarily. While he was still building, someone copied the idea and rushed an app to the store, same concept, same branding... Validating in public is great, until your validation becomes someone else's roadmap." Louie himself replied in the comments: "First app launch... excited to see it go live, copycat or not." The post doesn't name anyone. The timing lines up with both mise and Whipp, so it can't be pinned down.

Five months later (11-06):

(Google Play installs and App Store ratings by country, 11-06.)

mise is now roughly 6–8× Herbi's size. In Germany it has switched to the German name "mise – Essensplaner". Whipp went live in Spanish in October and collected 636 ratings in a month, then added the German store in November 5. Further out, between 6 and August, 18 new UK-launched apps with meal, recipe or dinner in their names appeared. TapCook, NeatEat, Budgy, Potto and Dinnr all belong to this wave. The veteran ReciMe (3.23M Play installs) has offered social recipe import for a long time. Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket, piloted an AI dinner plan in its own app in April and rolled it out fully in October. It uses loyalty card purchase history and lets you order from Tesco straight after the plan is built.

Feature-wise, Herbi has nothing competitors don't. "Cook once, eat twice" auto-scaling portions, air fryer and slow cooker recommendations, and a community-imported recipe library are all minor touches. It got going because its founder could make videos and named the need first. Latecomers are winning by affording creators.

Is the demand real?

Yes, and not just in the UK. Comments on 06-01's video include "we need this in Spain too", "groceries in the US are insane, we need it" and "where's the US version". Comments like "£35 a week? I spend £50 just popping out 😭" show the hook landed on the cost of living. mise picked up thousands of ratings in Germany and Whipp hundreds in Spain within weeks, which suggests people will pay in other countries too.

The same comments show hostility toward subscriptions: "obviously it's a subscription", "£89.99 a month right? 😂", "I won't subscribe to any more apps, give me a free version with ads or a one-time purchase." Herbi's hard paywall let it reach the top grossing chart on small installs, and it's also the source of its one-star reviews.

If it were you

C: copy the playbook, not the category. In five months this category went from one idea to dozens of apps. The leaders, mise and Whipp, have paid creator machines and are pushing into the US, Germany and Spain. The UK's own Tesco has entered too. Herbi itself now ranks third or lower in this wave.

Who it's for: indie devs whose native language is one that mise and Whipp haven't properly localized (11-06 see, mise has only 40–95 ratings on iOS in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Brazil, and its name is still English; in Japan it's practically zero), who already make TikTok videos, know where locals buy groceries, and whose supermarket chains are a hook in themselves.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone targeting the UK, US, Germany or Spain (creators have already been used to saturate them). Also anyone who can code but can't make short video (there's no technical moat here. A prototype takes days, and copying you takes the same days). And anyone hoping to win on features (users can't tell these apps apart).

How to build it: Get the app name and store listing claimed and a working version live first, then make videos. Herbi's biggest lesson is that "validate first, launch later" just hands your roadmap to others. Copy the product structure: supermarket + local currency weekly budget + kitchen gear → weekly dinner plan + shopping list, plus "share a recipe video into the app". Monetization can be softer than Herbi's: let people see their first week's menu before asking for money, lead with annual pricing, and test the payment return flow first.

How to acquire users: Shoot it the way 06-01 did: "No way, someone built an app where I pick [local supermarket], enter [local currency], and get a whole week planned in 35,30 seconds." Use screen recording with a voiceover, and put the supermarket name and prices in the hashtags. Once one video takes off, copy mise and amplify with paid creators instead of relying on your own account. Herbi's own accounts fell from hundreds of thousands to a few thousand in three months.

When to go: Whipp added Spanish in October and German in November, roughly one new market a month. mise is already gaining traction in Germany. To grab a country that's still open, launch and start posting videos before the 2027 January "New Year, save money, eat healthy" wave.

Signs you've misread it: ① Before year end, mise or Whipp's iOS ratings in France, Italy or the Netherlands pass 1,000. The gap is gone. ② Herbi's UK Play top grossing rank drops out of the top 10 after the Android backlog clears. That would mean the hard paywall plus own accounts can't hold up, and charging a lot per user doesn't save volume. ③ Conversely, if Herbi produces another million-view video within a month and Play weekly growth climbs back above 10k, it means people who can make videos still beat people who buy creators in this category. Then this route is easier than C.