The case for removing your guardrails

The arbitrary three

When we designed Intentr's free tier, three sessions per day felt reasonable. A session is bounded; you set an intention before you start consuming. Three felt like it encouraged intentionality without being punitive. But the data told a different story.

People weren't hitting the three-session wall and thinking, 'Good, I've been intentional enough.' They were hitting it and feeling trapped. Some were stacking intentions into a single longer session just to work around it. Others were bouncing between apps to kill time elsewhere because they couldn't start another bounded session in Intentr. The limiter we'd designed to support intention was actively working against it.

The insight wasn't that unlimited is always better. It's that if the friction isn't serving the person's actual behaviour, it's just friction.

What an attention ledger is supposed to do

The ledger is the core of how Intentr works. You state your intention. You set a timer. You consume content from creators you've chosen to follow. When the session ends, the app records what you spent your time on. That record is yours. No one's selling it. No algorithm is learning from it to make you scroll more tomorrow.

Seven days of that history works if you're checking in weekly. It's enough to see patterns. But a user who'd been with us for two months mentioned something in passing: she wanted to compare her September spending against her August spending. She couldn't. The ledger had rolled over.

Some people use the ledger therapeutically. They review their month to understand where attention goes. Others use it to justify their time to themselves, or to catch when they've drifted into habits they didn't intend. None of those use cases fit a rolling seven-day window.

The five-channel ceiling

Five followed channels was the free tier limit. Seemed sensible. Encourage focus, prevent overwhelm. But focus and overwhelm aren't the same thing. One user who follows a creator of long-form essays, a podcast network, a photography collective, a newsletter on urban design, and a film critic hit the ceiling immediately. She wanted to add a sixth. Her choice was either not follow at all, or subscribe to Plus.

We weren't uncomfortable with paid tiers. We designed them. But this felt different. The limit wasn't protecting her attention. It was gate-keeping curation. If Intentr's whole premise is that you choose what to follow, not an algorithm, then arbitrarily capping that choice doesn't make sense.

People asked for more channels consistently. So in Plus, we gave them unlimited. Simple as that.

Why the Plus tier exists at all

Here's what matters: Intentr pays creators 85% of subscription revenue. That's not use language. That's the actual share. A creator with three hundred engaged subscribers in Intentr makes real money because the subscription model cuts out ads and middlemen.

Running that system costs us money. Infrastructure, payment processing, payouts to creators, support. The free tier has to stay free, but it also has to reflect the real cost of what we're running. Limited sessions, limited channels, and limited ledger history were originally our way of saying: 'Use this for free, and if you want to go deeper, if you want the full experience, that's where we ask you to contribute.'

So we didn't remove those limits to be generous. We removed them because they were poorly chosen. The Plus tier still exists. It still costs money. But now the line between free and paid is clearer: Plus unlocks connected sources. You can pull in RSS feeds. Podcasts from any network. YouTube channels. That's the real difference. That's the feature that costs us more to support.

What removing limits taught us

The odd thing about shipping a change like this is that it forces you to articulate why the feature existed in the first place. We'd built guardrails because we thought intention needed friction. The user who messaged us about her third session showed us that friction and intention aren't allies. They're sometimes opponents.

Intention comes from the person, not the app. The app's job is to get out of the way. A session intention is a moment where you pause and ask: why am I consuming right now? That's the work. Everything after that should be frictionless if the person's already decided they want to be there.

We now believe that the Plus tier's real value isn't removing arbitrary caps. It's letting you feed Intentr from sources you already trust. Your RSS reader. Your podcast subscriptions. Your YouTube favourites. Those connected sources are the things that actually cost us money to integrate and maintain.

The ongoing question

A month after rolling out unlimited sessions, unlimited channels, and full ledger history to Plus subscribers, something interesting happened. The number of people upgrading didn't spike. It wasn't this huge conversion moment. But the people who did upgrade seemed to stay longer. They seemed more engaged. And the quality of their feedback improved because they weren't fighting the tool's boundaries anymore.

That matters more than a conversion spike. If the tool fits better, people use it better. They understand what it does. They understand why it costs what it costs. And they trust that the choices they're making inside the app are theirs, not the app's.