Three sessions a month: why we set that limit on Feedr's free tier

The problem with unlimited free

When we first shipped Feedr, we were generous. Too generous, in hindsight. Free tier meant unlimited sessions, unlimited audience size, no restrictions. It felt right. We wanted creators to try it, to feel the weight of real-time audience feedback without friction.

What we didn't anticipate was the cost structure. Every session on Feedr involves real-time message delivery, comment storage, and moderation infrastructure, even on the free tier. That lecturer running 47 sessions wasn't a problem in isolation. But multiply her by hundreds of creators, and suddenly our servers were carrying a load we hadn't priced into our business model. We were subsidising usage at scale we couldn't sustain.

More importantly, we weren't being honest about what the product was for. Feedr works best for specific moments: a conference talk, a podcast episode, a lecture, a community event. Not for perpetual, exhaustive use. The unlimited free tier accidentally encouraged people to treat Feedr like a utility rather than a tool for meaningful moments.

What creators actually need to decide

We spent two weeks talking to users. Not surveys. Real conversations. A church preacher in Manchester. A conference organiser in Edinburgh. A corporate trainer running internal workshops. A podcaster with a few hundred listeners.

The pattern was clear: creators don't run dozens of sessions a month. They run a handful. A preacher does one or two. A podcaster might do four. A conference speaker does one, maybe two in a year. Even the most active creators we spoke to rarely exceeded six sessions monthly.

Three sessions a month sounds arbitrary until you map it against real usage. It's enough for someone to properly test the product, to run a live event and see how their audience responds, to decide if Feedr's model of instant feedback actually changes how they engage with people. Three sessions is a season. It's decisive.

The 100-person audience cap came from the same logic. That's the size of a meaningful room. A lecture hall. A small conference breakout. A podcast with a real listener base. You can actually respond to comments at that scale. The feedback feels direct, not algorithmic.

The honesty bit

There's a second reason we set these limits, and it matters more than the infrastructure cost.

When your free tier has no boundaries, you're not being transparent about what your product is worth. You're hoping someone will upgrade eventually, even though they've never felt the actual constraint. It's a trick, really. It doesn't feel like one because it's standard, but it is.

We wanted Feedr's free tier to be genuinely useful and genuinely boundaried. Three sessions and 100 people is a real limit. When you hit it, you know exactly what you need: more sessions, larger audiences, or both. You know what the product does because you've run it. And you know whether upgrading to Creator (unlimited sessions, 500-person ceiling) or Pro (unlimited audience, analytics) makes sense for what you're building.

This approach is also kinder to the people we actually serve. If you're a creator serious about audience engagement, a paid plan is cheap: £6.99 a month for Creator, £14.99 for Pro. That's lunch money. It's not a barrier. But it's enough that you're committed, and we're committed in return. We're not showing you a feature and then yanking it away.

What we learned about mattering

Here's the thing nobody talks about: free tier limits are also a kind of curation. They shape who uses your product and how.

By setting three sessions as the ceiling, we're saying this is for people who care about specific moments of connection. Not for people running background noise. Not for people trying to build a feature they can't afford to pay for. Not for people who just wanted something free because it was free.

That sounds gatekeeping-ish, but it's the opposite. It means the people on Feedr's free tier are more likely to actually use it thoughtfully. They're more likely to get value from it. And they're more likely to upgrade, not because they've hit a punitive limit, but because they've felt the product work and want more of it.

We also learned something about ourselves. It's easy to chase scale. More users, more sessions, more audience noise. But Feedr isn't built for noise. It's built for signal. A comment that matters because a real person typed it and hundreds more upvoted it. A moment where a speaker changes their talk because of something their audience just said in real time.

Three sessions and 100 people. That's not a compromise. That's a shape. That's a decision about what Feedr is for.