The feature we didn't add

A recurring question we didn't want to answer

Face recognition came up early. People asked for it constantly. "Why can't I just search my daughter's name and see all the photos she's in?" It made sense. It still makes sense. The feature exists in our Forever tier now, at £34.99 for a two year event, because for some hosts - wedding photographers, professional planners, people managing huge galleries - it genuinely solves a problem.

But we were never going to put it on the free tier. Not because we couldn't technically. We could. The question was whether we should.

The free tier exists for a reason. It's how a bride discovers Poolr. It's how a parent finds us when organising their kid's birthday. It's how a church collects photos from a charity fundraiser. These aren't professional events; they're real life. And on the free tier, we collect up to 30 photos over seven days. Simple. Forgettable. You use it, you get your album, you move on.

What mandatory face recognition actually costs

The moment you require face recognition, you're not just collecting photos anymore. You're collecting biometric data. That changes what Poolr is, what we have to tell people, what we have to do with their information.

It means terms and conditions become genuinely serious. It means hosts have a responsibility they didn't sign up for. It means if someone uploads a photo of someone else's child, and we've tagged their face, we're holding something we shouldn't hold lightly.

The school administrator who raised it first - she wasn't worried about the feature itself. She was worried about liability. She was thinking: "I just asked 80 parents to upload photos. I don't want to become a data controller for facial recognition datasets." That one conversation shifted how we thought about the free tier entirely.

Making something free doesn't make it consequence-free. It just makes it invisible.

The real problem we were trying to solve

Here's what people actually want: they want to find photos of themselves. Not for identification. For memory. "Did anyone get a good shot of me in the dress?" "Is there a photo of my grandkids together?" These are human, ordinary questions.

We could've answered that question by scanning every free tier event automatically. We chose not to. Instead, if someone pays for Forever - the highest tier - they get face recognition. They get an automated highlight reel. They get the kind of smart album that actually saves time when you're sifting through a thousand photos from your wedding.

But everyone else gets what we call Reveal mode. It's a disposable camera aesthetic, borrowed from apps you might remember from a few years back. You upload your photos. You can't see the full album until the host decides to reveal it. You don't know whose photos are already there. You just contribute. When the reveal happens, you see everything at once. There's something honest about that. No algorithmic sorting. No machine deciding which moments matter. Just: here's what everyone brought.

Why we still built it anyway

Some people genuinely need face recognition. Wedding photographers who are processing 2,000 images. Event planners juggling multiple venues. Photographers offering Poolr as part of their package - they need to serve their clients fast.

So we built it. We put it in the Forever tier where it costs money, where people make an active choice to enable it, where we can be explicit about what they're opting into. It's not a default behaviour. It's a feature you unlock.

That asymmetry matters. The free tier stays simple. The people who need sophisticated tools pay for them. And everyone gets the core Poolr experience: scan a code, upload, see what everyone brought.

What we learned about friction

Here's what surprised us: reducing friction doesn't always mean removing features. Sometimes it means removing the wrong features. It means saying no to the clever thing so the simple thing stays simple.

The free tier works because it asks almost nothing of people. No account. No download. No algorithmic surprises. Just a QR code and a camera. When you add mandatory face recognition to that, you've added a decision tree, a privacy choice, a consequence. You've made it fractionally more complicated for someone whose event has 40 photos and will be forgotten in a week.

We could've called that "innovation." We called it friction.