“20 coins per 30-second video”: a small Seoul company has AI characters answer you on video, and with 60k installs it cracks the US and UK Top Grossing charts

AboveTech, a Seoul company with 5 people, built IF Drama Chat: you type a line, and instead of replying in text, the AI generates a short video with characters on screen, lines spoken aloud, and a plot that follows your choices. It has never been covered by any media, and nobody is talking about it on TikTok or X. It rode a batch of Facebook ads saying "stop staring at the text box," and its Google Play installs went from a few hundred in early September to 5 in November, the 62,020, adding 22k in the last 7 days. With only 60k installs, it's already charting on the Entertainment Top Grossing lists in the UK, US, and Australia. Below: what it is, where the traffic and money come from, who's competing, and whether you can get in on it.

A five-star review that says it's "not a scam"

On Oct 27, 2026, a US App Store user gave IF Drama five stars under the title "Expensive, but good quality, good-looking models." The first line of the review: "This app isn't a scam. What the ads promise is what you get. The characters in the ads are the same ones that show up in the app, no bait and switch." The last line: "The only downside is that it's ridiculously expensive, and you have to write very detailed prompts, or it misreads you and you burn through a pile of coins."

Three days before that, another five-star review was blunter: "My only complaint is the price. 20 coins for a 30-second video adds up fast."

These two reviews pretty much sum up the product: users came in from the ads, the promise that "the characters actually show up in the video" was delivered, and then they complained about the price while continuing to buy coins.

What it is

Regular AI character chats (Character.AI, Janitor AI, Talkie) are you typing and the character replying with text. IF Drama swaps the text reply for a video reply: you pick a story, pick an action or write your own line, and it generates a cinematic short with dialogue, action and sound, the character responding on camera, and the next line continues the scene. The store page tagline is "You don't only read the response. You watch it happen."

Android version launched in 2026 Aug 10, iOS in Sep 16, plus a web version at drama.if.place. The web homepage category tags show who it's feeding on: Fantasy (36 stories), Harem (29), BL (19), Love Hate (13), Ex Lovers (9), Taboo (5), and the payment terms list a separate "Mature Content" toggle. One US store review is titled "It's porn", another wants the adult side to be "more explicit". In short: romance, harem, BL and softcore are the main course (web tag count, 11-06).

How big it is now

The install curve is stepwise: flat for several days, then a jump of thousands to ten thousand in a day: October 8 +11,225, October 31 +9,401, November 2 +9,761. This shape looks more like ads pushed in batches than word of mouth climbing slowly (inference).

Take the iOS 4.7 rating with a grain of salt: in Sep 26 one five-star review read "I'm only giving five stars because they said I'd get 100 coins, and I want to see if they actually pay out." The Play update notes also say "complete tasks to get free coins." Part of the rating was bought with coins.

Where traffic comes from: Meta ads that use text chat as the thing to beat

It runs a Facebook page called "IF Drama Chat" filled with ad-style videos of about 30 seconds, all titled "Start AI Video Chat." Copy from a September 21 ad: "Still staring at text boxes? In IF Drama, characters show up on video. See them, hear them, and watch your next message become the next scene. Try IF Drama on iPhone." Another: "Stop settling for text-only AI character chats. Mizuki and Rin answer in video…" One ad's link slug is literally start-ai-video-chat-with-asian-girls. A third-party ad monitoring page shows roughly 59 ads running on Meta across 5 countries (estimate, unverified).

The playbook is clear: use the category's old format (the text box) as the foil and target the heavy users who are sickest of it. Creatives are cut by platform ("on iPhone") and by persona (Asian female characters). The selling point is itself a video, so a screenshot of the product is already an ad.

There are two side channels: on Reddit, the r/JanitorAI_Refuges subreddit where users who left Janitor AI gather has a post "Your choices turn into video scenes in IF Drama" written like the developer posted it; and in the App Store "You might also like" section it sits next to AI character story apps like Fizzz and Pippa. Searching TikTok turns up no official account or creator content, nobody has mentioned it on X in the past two months, and no English media has covered it.

Where the money comes from

Coins are sold per use. The web prices are public: first top-up 50 coins for $8.99, regular 25 coins for $8.99, 1,300 coins for $224.99; in-app purchases on Play run from $2.99 to $299.99. Using the review's "20 coins for a 30-second video," a 30-second video on the regular tier costs about $7, and about $3.6 on the first top-up tier (estimate).

Around coins there's a whole layer of promotions: when users try to leave, a pop-up offers "50 coins for $4.49, valid for 60 seconds"; tasks give free coins; there are win-back users and limited-time "thank you" packs; plus in-app Yearly Pro / Yearly Max annual memberships (buying coins gives 25% / 50% extra) and a Day Pass. The web version uses Toss Payments in Korea to take overseas credit cards, bypassing the store's cut.

So 60k installs reached the UK and US top grossing charts because of a small group of heavy users willing to spend tens or hundreds of dollars at once, not because lots of people pay small amounts. Reviews keep saying "expensive": "It's ok, fun idea but too expensive" (three stars), "Requires a lot of money. But worth it," "Coins are pricey though." The most-liked early Play review said that if there were a monthly unlimited membership, "I'd subscribe long-term."

What users are complaining about

• Slow and laggy: an August review said video generation is slow and fails after playing 5 seconds; the developer replied "we're working overtime every night to improve it." As late as October, someone still said "a bit slow and laggy, but really fun."
• You have to write in detail: if the prompt is vague it misunderstands you and you waste coins.
• Details get missed: one female user said it asked what kind of male lead she liked but never asked what she herself looked like in the story, so her character on screen ended up as a pair of men's hands.

On the other side, positive reviews focus on "realistic," "like a choose-your-own-adventure," "the character remembers what I picked before," and some directly compare it to FMV (full-motion video) games.

Who it's competing with

Both text character chat and AI short dramas are crowded, but mobile products where every chat turn generates a story video are still rare, and IF Drama is the earliest one to show revenue signals. Its edge isn't hard to copy: anyone can call a video model, and Character.AI already has video capability itself. The real barriers are story orchestration, keeping characters consistent, and the cost of each video, which it is still working on.

Who's behind it

AboveTech (어보브테크), based in Mapo-gu, Seoul, founded in November 2023. According to the founder's own posts on Threads, the company originally did blockchain outsourcing, shrank from 23 people to 5 when ChatGPT came out and switched to AI. Its first two products were local Korean ones: the AI four-pillar tarot app Zendi, which after 6 months brought in nearly ₩200M a month (about $140k); and IF, a K-pop idol character chat launched in August 2025, which the company says took the #1 spot in App Store AI character chat within 4 days (Korean media byline.network, aitimes, 2025-09). It raised a seed round in July 2025, with investors including Delightroom, the developer of the Alarmy alarm clock app.

IF Drama is the first time the IF brand has gone overseas and switched from text to video. In other words, this isn't a garage project: it's a team that already validated at home how to charge for AI interactive content and has the money to lose some on ad buying up front.

If it were you

One judgment: you can follow it, but be clear that this is a "paid acquisition + whale spending" business, not a product that grows slowly from organic traffic; the most worthwhile thing to do is target the audiences and languages it doesn't cover well, not build yet another English version.

Who it suits: 1–3 people, an engineer who can chain video generation models into a "input → script → storyboard → render" pipeline and keep the per-video cost down, and someone who can run Meta short-video ads and produce a dozen or more creatives a week; with tens of thousands of dollars to burn a month or two on ads. Knowing the content tastes of a specific audience (BL, otome, harem, a particular country's romance tropes) is a plus.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone with no ad budget who is counting on TikTok organic traffic or store search (IF Drama itself hasn't gained traction on TikTok); anyone who can't handle the store review and payment risks of suggestive content; anyone who wants to run a cheap subscription for volume, since every video costs real money and the price can't be pushed down.

How to do it: pick one of three directions.

• Change the audience: its web tags include 29 Harem and 19 BL, but judging from ad creatives and reviews the core is male-oriented (inference). Build a separate product for women (otome, BL), with characters, camera work and lead appearance designed for female users. The "men's hands" review is exactly where it falls short.
• Change the language: it only does English and Japanese. A Korean team naturally brings an Asian aesthetic, but local characters and story for high-paying markets like Spanish, Portuguese, German and French haven't been seriously done by anyone (no systematic check was done).
• Change the pricing: users in reviews explicitly ask for a monthly unlimited membership. Build a version with "N videos a day + monthly fee," use cheaper models to make low-resolution previews and render high-definition only after confirmation, bring the per-video cost down, and you capture the half of people who find it too expensive.

How to acquire users: copy its creative formula: in the first three seconds show a text chat box, then cut to the character speaking to you on video, ending with "Try it on iPhone." Make several versions by platform, persona and theme, test them on Meta with a small budget, and put more money behind the ones that convert. Then post in the Reddit communities for users who left Character.AI and Janitor AI. The web version collects payment outside the store's cut, and first-top-up discounts, leave-retention packs and coins for tasks are all validated tactics you can use directly.

When to move: few people know about it yet, and big players like Character.AI are still at "make the avatar move a little" on video. Launching and getting one audience or language working before the first half of 2027 would be a solid position; any later, and once Talkie, Character.AI or a short-drama company builds interactive video stories into its own app, ad acquisition costs will be pushed up.

What would mean you read it wrong:

• IF Drama's weekly Play installs in December dropped to a few thousand, and it fell off the UK and US entertainment Top Grossing charts 200 — suggesting paid acquisition stopped and the unit economics probably didn't work out;
• Character.AI, Talkie or ReelShort launch "story video every turn" and push it at scale — the differentiation is gone;
• You spent a month on Meta ads, and each paying user's payback can't cover the video cost plus ad spend. This business only works for teams with funding to burn, so stop early.

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Data and sources: Google Play store page, reviews and charts (10-29 to 11-06); App Store US store page and reviews (checked 11-06); IF Drama web homepage with payment, coin and refund terms (drama.if.place, 11-06); the Facebook page "IF Drama Chat" ad videos (2026-09-21); Reddit r/JanitorAI_Refuges; AboveTech website, Korean media byline.network, aitimes, wowtale (2025); Peekly ad and revenue estimates (unverified). Anything marked "inferred" or "est." is inference or estimation.