₹1 to get your chart read, then ₹699 deducted each period: how ShareChat's AI astrologer Reva reached 700k users in a week

Reva, India's AI astrology app, is now adding about 100k installs a day. It has ranked #2 on the India Google Play Lifestyle free chart for 9 days in a row, just behind Pinterest. The product itself is not new; similar apps existed a year earlier. What sets it apart is two things: the ad budget of its parent company, ShareChat, and a payment flow borrowed from short-drama apps: "₹1 trial, then UPI auto-debit." Below: what it is, where the money comes from, who is competing with it, and whether you should follow it.

A ₹ charge at 11:07 PM one evening

Around 18 at 11:07 PM one evening, an Indian user with a Canara Bank card linked to Google Pay got a charge of ₹699 with the note "Reva subscription." The next morning he posted on the complaint site Sikayetvar asking for a refund, saying he had never subscribed to anything.

Posts like this: from Sep 28 to Nov 4 the same page has more than a dozen, and they all follow the same course. The user sees an ad ("Nov 3 I saw Reva's ad while scrolling YouTube"), taps it, pays ₹1 to see their kundli (Vedic birth chart), and a few days later is charged ₹699 in the middle of the night. The payee is "MOHALLA TECH PRIVATE LIMITED," processed through PhonePe, Google Pay, or Paytm. One user said that after paying ₹1, the App "added a subscription of about ₹6,000," which gets taken as soon as there's money in the account.

Mohalla Tech is ShareChat.

What it is: an AI female astrologer called Reva

You enter your birth date, time, and place, and the App generates your Vedic chart. A persona called Reva, powered by AI, then talks to you about love, marriage, work, money, and family. The store listing says "every answer is based on your own planets and nakshatra (lunar mansion), not just your sun sign" and "no long forms." Chat is in Hinglish, available 24 hours a day.

The developer on the store is listed as "Askk App," which doesn't reveal who is behind it. But the package name in.mohalla.* uses ShareChat's namespace, the website revaastro.in's terms of use name the operator as Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. of Bengaluru, and the site's images are served from ShareChat's CDN. The same developer also has a human-astrologer app, "Askk - Talk to Astrologers," with just over 100k installs. ShareChat just reached operating profitability this year and is preparing a $400M IPO (Business Standard, 2026-07).

Play lists the launch date as 2026-09-08, but it actually launched earlier. The Instagram account @reva_astrologer posted promo reels as early as May 15, and the first YouTube tutorial on "how to get a refund for Reva auto-debit" went up in Jun 22 and now has 22k views. My inference is that it launched by 4 or May, and the September date was reset later.

How fast it grew

Only two ends to the ratings. About 12k people who gave 1 stars were mostly charged money. The 5-star reviews on the other end deserve a closer look.

Where users come from: one ad, then a page of good reviews

Its ads run mainly on Instagram and YouTube. @reva_astrologer has 110k followers but only 17 posts, which looks like an account built purely to run ads. The caption on May's reel reads "Sahi life decisions ke liye darr nahi, data chahiye" (you make the right life decisions with data, not fear), and it ends with "First chat is on us!" (your first chat is free). It targets young people: the tag is #GenZIndia, and the pitch is "don't let random astrology advice scare you."

People who arrive through the ad see a page of good reviews first. One user who gave it 31 stars on Oct 1 wrote: "I saw this ad on Instagram, saw lots of people leaving good reviews, so I believed it... and paid one rupee." Many of those reviews are template lines, like "Whether to change jobs was a dilemma, and I got a very direct answer" and "The money leak feature opened my eyes," which repeated word for word several times within two-plus hours on the night of Oct 30. Of the 150 most recent reviews, 137 are 5-star, and the total rating count has even dropped over several days (11-04 lost 413 reviews, 11-06 lost 387), which looks like the platform cleaning up. We don't know who posted the good reviews, but they clearly helped the ad close the sale and get people to hand over that ₹1.

We found no evidence that ShareChat or Moj (its short-video app) funnels traffic to Reva inside their apps. No tech outlet has covered it, and it's barely discussed on X.

Where the money comes from: behind the ₹1 is a long-term mandate

Few people in India use credit cards, so the most common way for apps to collect subscription fees is UPI Autopay (automatic UPI debit). Setting up an autopay mandate requires a real transaction first, and the ₹1 is there for exactly that. This June, a person named Aditya Sreekumar Warrier broke down the same flow used by Indian short-drama apps on LinkedIn. The mandate screen he captured showed: first payment ₹1, per-debit cap ₹699, debit frequency set by the merchant, valid from 2026 June to 2036 June. In his words: "Once you understand the ₹1 trial-to-autopay funnel, you'll see it everywhere: astrology apps, language apps, prayer and mantra apps..." An industry report (FICCI-EY) says 70–80% of paying Indian short-drama users pay through Autopay, and cancelling Autopay would lose up to 60% of them.

ShareChat itself has a short-drama app, QuickTV (92M cumulative installs on Google Play). Reva is essentially QuickTV's "feed ad → ₹1 → autopay" playbook, applied to astrology. We did not place an order to verify how often Reva debits or what year its mandate runs to. The complaints we can see mention a ₹699 charge, and some people were charged repeatedly.

This playbook works better for astrology, for three reasons:

• The question itself makes people want to pay: "Will this marriage work out?" and "Should I change jobs?" are questions many people already pay to have answered.
• AI costs almost nothing to run: Astrotalk, a human-astrologer platform, has to pay astrologers a revenue share and is capped by how many astrologers it can recruit. An AI answer costs a few paise, so each successful ₹699 debit can cover a high acquisition cost (inference).
• The money doesn't go through Play billing: Play lists in-app purchases at $0.49–64.99, but Indian payments mostly run on UPI, so it doesn't appear on India's Top Grossing chart at all. It only ranks in the 100-plus range on lifestyle Top Grossing charts in Malaysia, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Its real revenue is hidden from outside view, and it's likely much larger than the charts suggest (inference).

The reviews that don't look fake: what they praise

Strip away the template lines and the remaining praise centers on two things: "answers based on my own kundli, not generic predictions," and not scaring people, for example not invoking sade sati (the seven-and-a-half-year Saturn ordeal). That's exactly what Indian users dislike about human astrologers: they frighten you first, then sell you rituals and gemstones. Reva's ad copy, "data, not fear," is built on that point. At the product level, that's its only differentiator, and it's easy to copy.

Who it's competing with

The category is crowded. "AI Vedic astrology" already has several players. Install data is from Google Play, 11-06:

The one to watch most is Astro99. It isn't backed by a big company, it launched more than a year before Reva, and it's adding more users this week. There are YouTube tutorials on "how to turn off Astro99 autopay," and one posted 4 months ago has 71k views. So this playbook isn't unique to ShareChat; teams without big-company backing can run it too. That also means the Indian market is already crowded.

Why it's fragile

A 2.6 rating, with 1-star reviews outnumbering 5-star ones by half, and "scam" everywhere on complaint sites, YouTube, and LinkedIn. India's consumer protection regulator, the CCPA, classified "subscription traps" (using a free trial to sign people up for autopay, then hiding the cancel option) as a dark pattern and made it illegal 2023 years ago. NPCI, the operator of UPI, also now requires that every autopay mandate be viewable and cancellable in one central place. Every rupee collected today depends on users not being able to find the cancel button. Once that gap closes, the math on paid acquisition payback changes.

If it were you

One-line verdict: there's something to learn here, but copying it isn't a good deal. India's AI astrology space already has at least 7 players with tens of millions of installs. Reva and Astro99 are both spending heavily on ads and recovering costs through autopay. Late entrants have to compete on budget and be better at collecting payments. What's really worth taking away is a formula: put an emotionally charged consultation into AI, then pair it with a low-friction local autopay tool.

Who it suits: small teams that have run Meta or YouTube performance ads, can calculate the acquisition cost of each paying user, and have a budget to burn for 2–3 months before it pays back. Ideally they know a market outside India where astrology or tarot demand is high and a local autopay tool has just launched.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants to launch another AI astrology app in India in Hindi or English (Astro99 and Reva already occupy that spot); anyone without paid acquisition experience who is relying on organic store traffic; anyone who can't live with a rating more than 2 points below perfect and daily refund complaints.

How to do it: change the market, not the product. Copy the format: a named AI astrologer who answers based on the user's own chart, doesn't scare people, and doesn't sell rituals. Switch the payment rail to a local autopay tool. One candidate is Brazil's Pix Automático (launched in mid-2025), where demand for zodiac and tarot readings is high and card subscriptions have a high barrier to entry (inference; we haven't verified whether anyone is already doing this). Another is Indian diaspora in the Gulf states and Southeast Asia: Reva already appears on Top Grossing charts in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, where people pay by card and Play subscriptions work. Show the debit amount, frequency, and cancel option on the first screen. Successful debit rates will be lower, but ratings and platform risk will be much lower too, so the business can last longer.

How to get users: follow Reva's approach. Set up a dedicated Instagram account for running ads, use reels to present a specific dilemma ("Should I change jobs?" "Will he come back?"), end with "first one free," and have the landing page ask for birth details above the fold. Test 20–30 creatives in one country with a small budget. If you can bring the cost of acquiring an autopay mandate under half of the first debit amount, then scale up (inference).

Deadline: the sooner the better. This kind of play depends on regulation. India is tightening, so in any other market you need to shorten the payback period before that market introduces similar "central cancellation" rules.

What would show this read is wrong: ① If Reva and Astro99 keep their current weekly new-user numbers after NPCI's new rules are fully enforced, that would mean autopay isn't the key, the product itself retains users, and an "honest" AI astrology app could work in India too. This piece would then have underestimated it. ② If Reva's weekly new users fall below half of today's level before early 2027, or Play delists or restricts it, the funnel is breaking down and the window for copycats has closed. ③ If 2–3 AI astrology apps are already spending heavily on reels in the market you picked, then it's not an empty niche.