The moment we realised 500 wasn't enough

The problem we didn't expect to have

When we first built Feedr, we thought about audience size in brackets. Free tier: 100 people. Creator: 500. These felt reasonable. They matched the size of most talks, workshops, and church services we were talking to.

But conversations started shifting. A university lecturer told us she was splitting her 650-person lecture hall across two sessions to fit our limits. A podcast network was running back-to-back events because they hit the cap. A conference organiser in Dublin had to turn away audience members from joining live because there was nowhere left on the comment stream.

The frustration wasn't with the app itself. Feedr was handling comments, upvoting, and reactions smoothly at 500. The frustration was architectural. We'd created a ceiling that felt artificial to anyone hosting something larger than a standard conference session.

Why we didn't just make it bigger everywhere

The easy answer would have been to bump the Creator tier to 1,000 or 2,000 and call it a day. But that missed something. We knew that keeping audience size tiered made sense. The Free tier needs constraints; that's how free tiers work. Creator is for people building a regular practice around live interaction. Pro is for people who've committed to audience engagement as core to their work.

What we wanted to signal with Pro wasn't just 'more audience'. It was 'you can stop thinking about audience size'. A researcher running a lecture to 1,200 students. A church with a satellite campus. A conference session that overflowed. A podcast recording live with listeners joining in real time. These people shouldn't be managing a cap; they should be managing comments.

That's what unlimited audience on Pro actually means. It's not a number. It's permission to scale without planning around Feedr's limits.

The conversation we had internally

We tested the decision with existing users before we built it. Not a survey; actual conversations. We asked three tiers of people: those on Free, those on Creator, and a few who'd approached us saying they'd outgrown Creator.

The Free-tier users didn't care. Their events were small; the limit wasn't friction. Creator users were split. Some said 500 was plenty and they'd never need more. Others said they'd upgrade to Pro if they knew they could host their biggest events without worry.

The third group was the one that sold us. They'd all said some version of: 'We'd rather pay more once and never think about this again than upgrade later and restructure sessions.' That was honest feedback. It told us people value simplicity more than squeezing value from a lower tier.

What unlimited actually means to the host

On the practical side: Pro gives you unlimited sessions per month and unlimited audience members. You run Feedr on your phone or tablet from the host screen. Your audience scans a QR code, joins through their browser (no app, no account), and starts commenting. Whether 50 people join or 5,000, the comment stream works the same way. Upvoting still works. Pinning comments still works. Your moderators (if you've invited them via the guest moderator link) can review comments in the moderation queue before they go live if you want that control.

What changes on Pro is the analytics dashboard. You get detailed session reports beyond the basic one on Free and Creator: engagement metrics, peak comment times, which comments got the most upvotes, how long people stayed. For someone hosting regularly or in a professional setting, that data matters. It tells you what resonated.

Why this still isn't a webinar platform

We've had to be clear about this because people sometimes assume unlimited audience means we're trying to compete with the big webinar tools. We're not. Feedr does one thing: it lets your audience comment, upvote, react, and ask questions in real time while you're speaking or presenting. Your audience doesn't see or hear each other. They're not on camera. They're not in breakout rooms. They're participating in a live comment conversation with you and, if you choose, your moderators.

Unlimited audience works for that because comments are lightweight. A thousand people upvoting and commenting is very different infrastructure from a thousand people in a video call, and we've built for the former. The difference matters.

What we learned from saying yes

Building unlimited audience on Pro changed how we think about the product. It wasn't about adding a feature; it was about removing a restriction that was getting in the way of people's work. Every limit we've built into Feedr since then, we question differently. Is this a technical boundary or a pricing boundary? Is this protecting the product or just controlling the user?

The Manchester organiser, by the way, stayed with Creator. Her events never actually exceeded 500. But she told us later that knowing Pro existed made her feel like Feedr could grow with her if she needed it to. That was worth more than we expected.