Rise and shine… While we were catching some sleep, the team behind a recent fashion app dropped another hit.
Their newest app, The Ick, is already going viral. It comes from Vaste Company, the French crew known for the second-hand fashion search engine Refind.
Leading the charge are co-founders Ilies Kanari, Amine Lachgar, and Mandiaye Badiane.
This time, after experimenting with several lifestyle and fashion apps, they moved into a more controversial niche: the fanta($)tic world of social media follower trackers.
They’re watching you
The Ick is a “recent follow” tracker for Instagram. It lets users keep an eye on public profiles and notifies them whenever a chosen account follows someone new.
It doesn’t ask for Instagram logins, so it stays within the platform’s rules. Instead, it just pulls public info and shows it in a simple feed.
Most of the features are locked.
Users pick the Instagram handle they want to scan, wait for it to finish, and just when curiosity peaks, they run into a paywall.
The pricing is subscription-based: weekly at €7.99, a discounted first-week offer at €4.99, and an annual plan at €44.99.
Early momentum
The Ick went live on the App Store on 16 September 2025, with the Android release following in October. Within weeks, it reached the top 15 free utilities on the Spanish App Store and later achieved similar rankings in Mexico and France, signaling strong early demand.
Last month it secured $20,000 over 60,000 downloads (App Store and Google Play combined).
A TikTok native niche
A follow tracker is natural fuel for UGC. Creators can build short, messy “stalking” or cheating narratives that are just pure drama, while slipping in the product as the reveal. The best part is that you can invent literally anything, as long as you make the viewer believe it.
Watching a partner’s online behavior is a touchy subject with extreme demand, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
It’s no wonder that the vast majority of their videos openly show people catching their partner “cheating online”.
A worldwide UGC campaign
Behind the scenes, Vaste has recruited dozens of small creators and turned them into a tightly run micro-influencer network.
They currently manage 23 TikTok accounts posting in English, French and Spanish.
Since October, this wave has generated more than 20M views.
You can find all accounts and videos here.
Most profiles are framed as “secret accounts”, fitting the stalking angle.
Seven ambassadors have gone viral in the past month.
The top performer, @guasecretacc, has pulled 8.1M views across just 21 videos.
She posts exclusively in Spanish and blew up in November with simple shocked selfies and the following hook:
“AÑOS de stalkeo y recién me entero que se puede hacer esto?“
Translation: YEARS of stalking and I’m only now finding out you can do this?
The Grandma variation
The second biggest creator is also Spanish and uses the same format, but with an older woman as the main character.
That clash between Gen Z meme style and an elderly protagonist makes the clips stand out and adds humor layer that is leading to millions of views.
“30 AÑOS DE MATRIMONIO Y ME ENTERO DE ESTO AHORA“
Translation: 30 YEARS OF MARRIAGE AND I FIND OUT ABOUT THIS NOW
AI drama in a waiting room
On October 20, @niiniinhaaaa , one of the faceless accounts, posted an AI-generated skit in French that reached 1.4M views.
It shows a girl in a waiting room completely losing it after learning, through the app, that her boyfriend cheated and demanding urgent attention.
The scene looks real enough that viewers filled the comments mocking her.
“Les salles d’attente à la Croix-Rouge c’est trop” (French)
Translation: The waiting rooms at the Red Cross are too much
The Real Ick
In the end, The Ick is more than a gossip app. It shows how a small Paris team used relationship anxiety and TikTok drama to turn a basic follow tracker into a fast-growing subscription business in less than two months.
It proves that simple tools backed by emotion, creators and UGC can scale to real revenue.
At the same time, it raises uncomfortable questions about consent, trust and casual surveillance, even when everything is based on public data.
Whichever side we stand on, The Ick is a clear example of how insecurity can be packaged, marketed and sold.
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