The watermark we chose not to add

The message that changed our thinking

A YouTube creator using our free tier wrote to ask when video recording would arrive. Fair question. We'd promised it for Creator subscribers, and she was ready to upgrade. But then she added something we weren't expecting: "Will there be a watermark? I use three other apps and they all add their logo. It's getting ridiculous."

That single line made us pause. We weren't being asked for more features, better filters, or faster processing. We were being asked not to do something.

I dug into our feedback channel. The pattern was there. Not a flood of complaints, but consistent enough. Creators on low budgets, building audiences from zero, recording in bedrooms and borrowed studio spaces, didn't want their work branded with another company's logo. Some had mentioned it explicitly. Others had just... stopped using teleprompter apps that watermarked their exports.

The business case nobody makes

Here's the thing about watermarks on paid tiers. They're usually there for two reasons: brand awareness (free users see your logo and might upgrade) or as a punitive gap between paid tiers (forcing people to the highest plan to remove it). Both made sense to us, on paper.

But we asked ourselves a harder question. If someone pays us £5.49 a month for video recording, are we really going to make them look unprofessional in their own content so they'll upgrade to Pro? That felt backwards.

The Creator tier exists because creators need to record video without breaking their budget. They're the people grinding. They're not sitting in a production suite with a department budget. They're the ones who notice every unnecessary friction point because every unnecessary friction point costs them time or money.

Removing the watermark from Creator tier wasn't a feature request we could measure in surveys. It was a respect thing. We wanted them to own what they made.

What we kept, what we changed

Pro subscribers get a branded export overlay. That's intentional. It's a choice. If you're working at that level, you might want to signal which tools you use. Some creators do. They build their brand around their process. That's fine.

But Creator tier? That's the tier for people who just need to record a script without distraction. They get watermark-free exports, the same as Pro. They get video recording, AI script writing for first-draft help, all the teleprompter themes, and manual exposure control so they can look right even in bad lighting.

What they don't get, because they don't need it yet, is the pacing coach, voice scroll, per-take recording workflow, or the full Brand Kit if they want to build a custom look. Those are Pro features because they're for creators who've crossed a threshold. People recording enough content that every second of workflow matters.

The watermark decision didn't cost us anything. It gained us something quieter: the trust that we weren't going to make creators look worse to sell them upgrades.

The small things that reveal intent

I think a lot about what small decisions say about a company. Watermarks on a paid product say one thing. Removing them says another.

When we launched Creator tier, we got a handful of messages from people saying they'd been waiting for this specifically. Not "waiting for video recording," but "waiting for video recording without the logo." A few switched from competitors who'd added watermarks to their paid exports. One person said our approach felt like we actually understood what it meant to be a creator on a budget.

That's the kind of feedback that sticks with you. Not because it's marketing gold, but because it proves the decision was right.

The free tier still matters most to us for discovery. Smart Scroll and Timed Scroll work well, the script import is generous, and the three-script limit is enough to let people taste what Promptr does before they commit. If they upgrade to Creator, they get professional exports without anyone's logo cluttering their frame. If they go Pro, they get the workflow features that save hours every month.

Each tier earns its position. None of them punish you for not buying the most expensive option.

What this taught us about building for creators

Running an app studio for creators means understanding what they're actually trying to do. They're not trying to showcase our technology. They're trying to look good, speak clearly, and ship content on time.

Sometimes the right feature is the feature you don't add. Sometimes respecting your users means saying no to something that works everywhere else.

The watermark wasn't a small thing for us to remove. It was a decision about who we were building for and what we believed they deserved. That matters more than the cost of the logo in the corner.