The session limit that almost broke our first customer

The constraints we started with

When we shipped Feedr, the free tier felt right to us. Three sessions per month, up to 100 audience members. We figured: test it out, see if real-time audience interaction actually works, then upgrade if you like it.

What we didn't account for was the rhythm of actual creator work. A church doesn't hold three sermons a month. It holds four. A conference speaker doesn't run three sessions over thirty days; they might run three in a single day. A university lecturer teaches the same course every week. The free tier wasn't a trial ground. It was a brick wall.

That pastor's email changed how we thought about the Creator tier. He wasn't a large organisation. He was a single person, running something weekly, trying to engage his congregation in real time. He didn't need unlimited audience members. He needed not to hit a session ceiling on Tuesday.

Why we scrapped the monthly session counter

The decision to make Creator unlimited felt obvious once we'd talked to enough people. A lecturer doesn't want to choose which three of their ten weekly classes get audience engagement. A podcast host doesn't want to count sessions on a calendar. A speaker doing a multi-day conference doesn't want to pick which talks get comments and which don't.

Unlimited sessions meant removing the friction entirely. No more maths. No more 'I've got one session left, should I use it today or wait?' No more feeling like you'd paid for something you couldn't actually use the way you work.

The 500 audience cap stayed because it matters. It's the threshold where you need something else. Five hundred people in a live comment stream is real engagement. You can still meaningfully upvote, reply threads become useful, a guest moderator can actually moderate without losing their mind. Push beyond five hundred and the stream becomes noise, which defeats the point of Feedr entirely. At that scale, you want video conferencing, or a proper webinar platform with polls and breakout rooms. We're not those things, and we never will be.

The moderation tools that came with it

Unlimited sessions without moderation felt reckless. Not because of trolls, though they exist. But because hosting means you own the room. If fifty people are posting at once, and you're the only one deciding what's visible, you need actual tools, not hope.

So Creator came with the moderation queue. Comments land in a queue before they hit the live stream. You see them, you approve or hide them, things move fast. Emoji reactions stay enabled so your audience can still react instantly. Pinning comments means you can lift the most important question to the top in real time.

And if you're doing something big, or you trust someone else to help, there's the guest moderator invite link. You send that to someone, they get moderation access without creating an account or logging in. We keep it minimal because we know most people aren't running moderation teams. They're running their own sessions, maybe with one trusted person helping.

The leap to Pro (when five hundred isn't enough)

We didn't want Creator to feel limited. It shouldn't. But we also knew some people would outgrow it, and we wanted to build a path that made sense.

Pro removes the audience cap entirely. Unlimited. It also adds the session analytics dashboard, which tells you things Creator doesn't: how many people commented, which comments got upvoted most, how long people stayed. For people running large events or using Feedr as part of a bigger content operation, those numbers matter. They show what landed, what your audience actually engaged with.

But here's the thing we're careful about: Pro isn't a better version of Feedr. It's a different use. If you're hitting five hundred people regularly, you're probably not trying Feedr anymore. You're running it as part of your actual operation. The analytics dashboard is for you to understand what worked, not to optimise Feedr itself.

Why we didn't add everything Creator users asked for

We fielded requests for live polls, word clouds, fancy branching logic. All valid. All things that would make Feedr more powerful in specific moments.

We said no to most of them because of what Feedr actually is: a real-time comment stream you can moderate and curate. Adding live polls turns it into a survey tool. Adding word clouds turns it into a visualisation product. Both are useful, neither is what we're building right now.

The bet with Creator and Pro is that people don't want everything. They want what works. A comment stream that's actually manageable. Moderation tools that don't slow you down. Guest moderators who can help without complexity. Analytics that show you what happened, not predict what might.

Sometimes the most powerful version of a tool is the one that doesn't try to do everything. Feedr does real-time audience interaction well. We built Creator and Pro around that, not around what we could add.

What unlimited sessions actually means

That pastor uses Feedr every week now. Four sessions a month, sometimes five. He's not thinking about the unlimited sessions feature. He's not counting. He's just running his broadcast and reading live comments from his congregation.

That's the point. Unlimited sessions means the feature disappears. It stops being a constraint you're aware of and becomes part of your workflow. You hit record, you start your session, you engage. The limit isn't in your head anymore.

Creator costs £6.99 a month or £49.99 a year. It's not expensive because it doesn't need to be. You're not paying for unlimited anything. You're paying for unlimited sessions to actually be unlimited, and for the moderation tools that make it safe to do that at scale.