Swipe Up for a Shaman: A Korean Video App for Fortune-Tellers Hits the Top-Grossing Chart

FlipToc, an app from the Seoul startup ASX Company, arrived on the App Store on Oct. 7. It turns fortune-tellers into a vertical video feed: swipe until a reader catches your eye, tap, and you are in a one-on-one video call billed by the minute. Six days after launch it ranked No. 23 on Korea's top-grossing Lifestyle chart, and it has stayed between No. 21 and No. 26 every day since.

The store listing calls FlipToc an "AI consultation service," but the tarot, saju and shamanic readings come from people. The AI handles subtitles, translation and note-taking. The business is also unusually easy to see. The app has three ratings, yet its website publishes how many sessions and minutes each reader sold. Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 18, 57 of its 91 listed readers made a sale, for a combined 1,659 video sessions and about 248 hours.

Finding a reader works like scrolling short videos. Each reader gets a full-screen clip with like, comment and share buttons, and a swipe brings up the next one. Tapping in opens a card that states the per-minute charge and cancels itself if you don't confirm in time. The listing promises no booking, one flat per-minute rate for every reader, and categories covering tarot, saju, face reading and *sinjeom*, the Korean practice of consulting a spirit through a shaman.

Translation is the AI's first job. During a call, live subtitles run under the video; in a store screenshot, a user says in English that they have an important interview, and the Korean reader's replies appear in English too. The website comes in Korean, English, Chinese and Thai, and the app can be downloaded in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and Thailand, though it has no ratings in any of those stores yet. ASX Company's hiring page describes FlipToc as a global video counseling service for Korean fortune-tellers. Its chief executive previously founded the K-pop fan platform MyMusicTaste.

Its second job is remembering what the reader said. After each call the app writes a summary, and Flip AI, which says it answers only from those summaries, can be asked about them later. In the screenshot, a user asks what the reader advised about relationships; the AI answers from a session dated June 25 and links the date. Asked which kind of social gathering the reader meant, it says the record doesn't say. Automatic notes aren't new in Korea: Cheonmyung, a long-running app for phone and chat readings, offers an "AI consultation note." FlipToc goes a step further by letting you question the notes.

Those notes pass through OpenAI. FlipToc's privacy policy says call audio and text are sent to OpenAI for speech-to-text and Flip AI's summaries, and are not kept after processing. With the user's consent, FlipToc keeps call video and audio in case of disputes until the consultation contract ends. The reader you choose also receives your session history and keeps it for six months after the service ends.

The ranking shows sales concentrated in a few readers and a few long calls. Tarot accounts for 962 sessions, close to 60 percent, but they average about seven minutes. Readers filed under divination, most of them shamans by their titles, sold 343 sessions at nearly 13 minutes each. The top earner comes from that group: 58 sessions totaling 27 hours and 43 minutes in 18 days. The seven busiest readers account for almost half of all minutes, while 34 readers have yet to sell one this month. The figures are self-reported, and the page doesn't say whether they include the web and Android versions.

On the chart, most of FlipToc's neighbors are fortune-telling apps, many of them built on AI. Twelve of the top 40 grossing Lifestyle apps in Korea on Oct. 18 were fortune-telling apps, including the AI character app Kim Gwija Halmoni at No. 17, SajuGPT at No. 23 and Tight Saju at No. 25, with FlipToc at No. 24. The chart ranks by revenue. With a few ratings and just over 100 downloads on Google Play, FlipToc has held a spot in the 20s for a week, which suggests a small number of users spending real money. Who they are, and why they pay, neither the store nor the website says.

Many of the apps around it hand the reading to a model. FlipToc keeps the model on the side, translating and taking notes, and leaves the fortune-telling to the person on the other end of the call.