The thing we got wrong about audience size

The cap that made sense on paper

When we first shipped the Creator tier, 500 felt like the right number. Most speakers we talked to ran sessions for 200 to 400 people. Universities, small conferences, corporate training rooms. The math worked. Infrastructure was stable. We could promise reliability without sweating.

But "most" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, isn't it? We were optimizing for the median, not the outliers. And it turned out the outliers were telling us something important.

A podcast host in Bristol wanted to open her live recording to her Patreon community. A motivational speaker in London was hitting us on tour dates where his audience varied wildly. A university auditorium in Edinburgh hosted a public lecture with 2,000 seats and no idea how many people would show up.

Each one had to choose: cap the session early, turn people away, or stay on the Free tier and lose moderation tools and analytics. None of those feel like wins.

The conversation that changed it

I was on a call with a festival organizer in October. She runs a sustainability conference with 1,500 delegates across three days. Feedr solved her problem perfectly. Speakers could go live after their talks, take comments from the room, moderate in real time. Her audience wouldn't need to download anything. Frictionless.

Then she asked: "Which plan do I need?" When I said the Pro tier was unlimited, she paused. "So you already know 500 isn't the right number."

She was right. We did know it. We had the data. We had the customer requests. But we'd treated the cap like a feature instead of a constraint we'd outgrown.

The Pro tier now offers unlimited audience because that's what we should have offered from the start if we were honest about the product we'd built.

What actually changes when you remove the ceiling

For most Feedr users, nothing changes. A lecturer with 80 students, a conference panel with 300 attendees, a podcast host with a loyal 250-person listener base - they're not hitting the 500 limit anyway. The change matters for people running big events.

But there's something less tangible that shifts. When you remove an arbitrary boundary, you stop treating growth as a technical problem to manage and start treating it as a normal part of the experience.

The session analytics dashboard that comes with Pro tier becomes more useful at scale. Comment moderation, emoji reactions, pinning live comments, guest moderator links - these tools don't become magically more powerful with 1,000 people versus 500. But they become essential. The noise increases. The need for control increases.

We've learned that people running large sessions are doing something different with Feedr. They're not just asking questions; they're managing a conversation. They're looking at the analytics afterward to see what resonated. They're nominating someone from the audience to help filter and respond.

The trade-off no one asked us about

Removing the cap required real infrastructure work. We had to rethink how comments flow, how upvoting aggregates, how the comment stream renders when you've got hundreds of messages per minute. It's not magic. It's engineering.

But here's what didn't happen: we didn't raise the price. Pro stays at £14.99 a month or £119.99 a year. That was non-negotiable. The people running big events aren't trying to avoid cost; they're trying to avoid friction. They're trying to include their whole audience, not segment it.

The trade-off is on us, not them.

What this tells us about building for real people

If I'm honest, we got a bit too comfortable with the 500 limit. It was safe. It was measurable. It made the roadmap easier to plan. But safe isn't the same as right.

The best feature requests don't come as formal feedback forms. They come when someone clever figures out a way to use your product that you didn't anticipate and then runs straight into the wall you built. The Manchester pastor, the festival organizer, the tour-date speaker - they weren't asking for unlimited audience. They were asking to do their job without negotiating with our constraints.

Feedr is for people who want to hear from their room without making attendees jump through hoops. No app. No account. Just a QR code and genuine engagement. When your audience gets big enough that you need real moderation tools and detailed analytics, you shouldn't have to choose between that and actually including everyone who showed up.