Why we built unlimited audience on Pro
A speaker at a tech conference in Manchester reached out three weeks after using Feedr for the first time. Her event had grown from 200 expected attendees to 480. The session worked brilliantly. The audience loved it. And then she hit our Creator tier ceiling at 500 people, which meant turning away the last eighty attendees from the live comment stream. She didn't ask for a refund. She asked us a question that stayed with me: 'What happens when your event actually succeeds?'
The moment we realised scaling was the wrong constraint
We'd launched Feedr with the Creator tier capped at 500 audience members. It felt generous at the time. Most events we saw were smaller: classroom talks, church gatherings, smaller conferences. 500 seemed like plenty.
But the feedback kept coming. A lecturer ran a public lecture that drew 620 people. A podcaster did a live recording and suddenly had 750 listeners wanting to participate. A pastor held a special service that tripled the usual congregation. Each time, the same problem: they'd hit the wall, and either we had to turn people away or they'd have to buy a whole new tier.
The frustration wasn't with the price. It was with being told their success had a ceiling. That's when we stopped thinking about audience size as a compliance constraint and started thinking about it as an arbitrary limitation. If someone had built a great event and grown their attendance, why should we punish them for it?
What unlimited actually means in our world
When we decided to build the Pro tier, we had to answer a serious technical question: how do we handle unlimited audience without the system falling apart?
The honest answer was that our real bottleneck wasn't database capacity or server load. Feedr is a real-time comment stream and upvoting system. A comment takes microseconds to broadcast to all connected devices. Five hundred people or five thousand people commenting simultaneously doesn't create the same scaling problem that a video platform would. The infrastructure was ready; we'd just been artificially holding it back.
But 'unlimited' also meant something else we needed to get right: moderation. When you're dealing with five hundred people, moderation is a manageable background task. When you're dealing with five thousand or ten thousand, you need tools that actually work. We'd already built the comment moderation queue in Creator, but Pro needed something sharper. We added the guest moderator invite link so a host could bring in trusted people to help filter spam and off-topic comments in real time.
The session analytics dashboard came next. If someone is running an event with thousands of participants, they deserve to see who was there, how engaged they were, and what the conversation actually was about.
A decision that changed how we talk about tiers
The Pro tier announcement didn't feel like a typical product launch. We weren't adding a flashy new feature or launching a redesign. We were removing a limit that shouldn't have been there. That clarity mattered.
It also forced us to think harder about what each tier is actually for. Free is still for trying it out, for small meetings, for dipping your toes in. Creator is where most event hosts live: it's got unlimited sessions, moderation tools, emoji reactions, the ability to pin comments, and room for five hundred people. That's a complete, professional offering. Pro is for the people running large events or multiple big events, people who need the analytics and the peace of mind that comes with knowing there's no hidden ceiling waiting to trip them up.
We haven't heard from the Manchester speaker in a while now, but I imagine her next event will be bigger still.
Why this matters more than you'd think
Building Feedr started from a simple insight: audience engagement software shouldn't make attendees download apps or create accounts. Just scan the QR code, you're in, you can comment and upvote. We kept that simple. But somewhere along the way, we'd added complexity in the wrong place. We'd made creators think about tier ceilings when they should be thinking about their event.
Removing that friction, even though it seems like a small thing, changes the product's purpose. Feedr becomes a tool that grows with you instead of a tool that makes you plan around its limits. A classroom discussion that becomes a public lecture. A small podcast that becomes a live event that draws hundreds. A church service that outgrows the building and goes hybrid.
The technical work was straightforward. The mental shift was the hard part: accepting that a product that actually works should get out of its own way.
If you're running events and you've felt constrained by someone else's idea of 'big enough,' does that change how you think about the tools you're using?