Why We Built Feedr's Free Plan Around 3 Sessions and 100 People

The Case for Starting Small

When we launched Feedr, we faced a decision most app makers face: how generous should the free tier be? Generous enough that people actually use it. Not so generous that they never upgrade. That's the balance, and it's real.

We landed on 3 sessions per month with a 100-person audience cap for a reason. Three sessions is enough for a lecturer to run a small class. Enough for a speaker to test the format before a conference. Enough for a church pastor to pilot it during a Sunday service and see if congregation engagement improves. But not enough for someone to run a whole semester of lectures, or host a 500-person event, without bumping into a limit.

The 100-person cap works similarly. Most smaller events, workshops, and talks sit in the 20 to 80-person range. We see this in our logs. A hundred gives breathing room for a mid-sized gathering, but once you're running bigger rooms or recurring sessions, you'll need the Creator or Pro tier. And that's the intended path.

Testing Without Friction

Here's what we actually cared about when setting those limits: making sure the first experience felt real.

If we'd capped the free tier at one session per month, new users would delay trying Feedr. They'd sit on it, waiting for 'the right moment', and then forget about us. If we'd given unlimited sessions but capped the audience at 20 people, most would feel the product was too small to matter. The numbers we picked, 3 and 100, hit a sweet spot where someone can genuinely test whether Feedr solves their problem without it feeling like a crippled trial.

The university lecturer I mentioned? She ran three sessions with her different cohorts in the first six weeks. By session three, she knew she wanted to keep using it. Her larger class was the trigger to upgrade. That's the arc we're betting on. The free tier isn't meant to be a permanent solution for high-volume hosts; it's meant to let you know, quickly and without risk, whether you actually need what Feedr does.

What Free Gets You (and Doesn't)

Let's be straight about what's included and what isn't, because it matters for deciding if free is enough for you.

The free plan gives you the core feature: a live comment stream. Your audience joins via QR code, posts comments, upvotes things they agree with, and you see it all in real time on your phone. You get a basic session report afterward, so you know how many people attended and what they said. No app downloads for your audience, no accounts, no friction. That's not trivial. It works.

What you don't get on free: moderation tools to pre-approve comments before they go live. Emoji reactions to add visual texture to responses. The ability to pin a comment so it stays at the top. Guest moderator links if you want someone else helping you manage the session. None of those exist on the free tier.

The Creator plan (£6.99 a month or £49.99 annually) unlocks all four of those. Unlimited sessions too, instead of three per month. The audience cap rises from 100 to 500. Most of the people we see upgrade from free land here, because they're running regular sessions or bigger events and want the moderation controls.

The Pro tier is for analytics. If you're running events regularly and need to understand engagement patterns over time, the analytics dashboard is where that lives. Unlimited audience size as well.

The Real Constraint Isn't Numbers

Here's something I've learned from watching how people use Feedr: the 3 sessions per month limit and the 100-person cap aren't really the constraint. The constraint is whether you have a genuine use case.

We've had people run events with 40 people on free and upgrade immediately. We've had others push up against the 100-person cap and realise they'd rather use something else entirely. Numbers alone don't drive the decision. Your actual need does.

The free tier is honesty. It says: here's what Feedr can do, here's what you get to test it, and here's the point at which we ask you to pay because you're now getting enough value to make it worthwhile for both of us. No dark patterns. No sudden cliffs where the product becomes unusable. Just a clear boundary.

We keep an eye on the telemetry. If we see loads of free-tier users consistently hitting three sessions per month and abandoning the app, we know the cap is too low. If everyone on the free tier stays way under the 100-person limit, we know we could tighten it. So far, the mix feels right. People test Feedr on free, many upgrade when they have a real need, and a meaningful number stay on free because they genuinely don't need more.

Who Actually Stays Free, and Why

I want to name who the free plan actually serves well, because it's not just 'people who can't afford to pay'.

We have university lecturers who run three or four small seminars and use Feedr in each one. They hit the three-session limit when exam season ends, wait for September, and reset. They don't upgrade because free is genuinely enough. We have a pastor who uses Feedr once a month for a special sermon series and stopped when the series ended. He'll pick it back up when he runs it again next year. There's a podcaster who ran a live Q&A with her audience using Feedr and never came back because it was a one-off experiment.

These aren't failed conversions. They're people for whom the free tier is the correct price, because they don't need the product often enough to justify monthly spend. That's fine. That's healthy. An app that only serves paying customers is an app that's priced wrong or solving the wrong problem.

What we're not trying to do is trick you into needing an upgrade you don't actually need. The 100-person cap is where most events naturally fit. The three-session allowance is where the testing happens. If your needs are bigger or more regular, you upgrade. If they're not, you stay free. Both are intentional.