"We're expecting 800 people. Which plan do we need?"
That email arrives most weeks in festival season, and the honest answer is that 800 isn't the number that decides it. Headcount is what goes on the insurance form. What you buy from us is how many phones will be inside a game at the same moment, and the two are almost never the same. Put 800 people in a park for an afternoon and you might see 70 phones in the game at the peak. Put 400 people in a conference coffee break and you can see 120 in ninety seconds.
If you're new here, this is the whole pricing model. PlayTours is a scavenger hunt that runs in the phone's browser; you build the game in a web editor, players scan a QR code, nothing gets installed. Every plan has every feature. The only thing you pay for is how many phones can be playing at once, across all your games. The free plan allows 25 and shows a small watermark. Paid plans remove the watermark and raise the number. That's it.
What counts as a device
A device is one phone or tablet actively playing. Two people sharing a phone count once. The count is across every game on your account at the same time, not per event, and a device stays "active" while it's in use plus a short idle window afterwards.
If you reach your cap, new devices wait to join until someone goes idle. Nobody already playing gets kicked out. Tell your greeters that, so nobody starts rebooting phones when the join screen says to wait.
Three shapes of crowd
The 2026 World Cup is running across the US, Mexico, and Canada right now (11 June to 19 July), and fan zones show the problem clearly. People drift in from noon, spike the second a match kicks off, and drift out when the next queue opens. Buy for the gate and you overpay. Buy for the average and you hit a join wall at the worst possible minute.
Buy for the spike. Never for the gate.
The trickle-in public day. Farmers' market, open house, fan zone, city festival. Maybe 2,000 people walk through between 10 and 4, and maybe 80 phones are in the hunt at 11:40. Size for the spike you can see on the dashboard during a trial hour.
The timed cohort. An intern class, a conference coffee break, an offsite that starts at 9:00 sharp. If 120 people tap Join within ninety seconds, you need 120 concurrent devices. This is the shape that catches people out, because they assume staff will trickle in. If the QR is on the projector, everyone joins at once.
Staggered waves. Campus orientation, trade-show booth hours, a museum late night. Groups of 40 every half hour. A 60-device plan holds if you keep a gap between waves. If wave two starts before wave one has submitted its last photo, it won't.
The plans
Every paid tier removes the watermark. The 5-device plan exists for small teams whose only goal is getting the watermark off the screen. Above 300 concurrent devices, email us; we scale from the 120-device price and can usually do 10 to 15 percent off for large one-day spikes.
For a one-off event, subscribe for a month and cancel afterwards. We bill monthly and don't prorate, so cancel the day after rather than the day before. Your games stay in the account if you come back next year.
A session can also cap teams or devices for that one game. That's a separate switch from the subscription. Players create extra teams by accident and join twice from a second phone, so leave a little slack. Twenty unused seats is a much easier problem than a blocked QR at the door.
Three real sizings
A public riverfest. 800 guests, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., hunt optional. Last year about one in five groups played, and not all at once. I'd start them on the 120-device plan at USD 159 and watch the dashboard for the first hour. If they sit at 40 devices they've overbought, which is fine for year one. If they hit 120 and joins start queueing, they upgrade for the afternoon. There's no refund for unused hours, so pick once with a little room.
A conference. 400 badge holders, hunt during a 25-minute expo break. Assume 30 percent play, almost all at once. That's about 120 devices. A 60-device plan is tight for a break, because breaks create interest.
An office. 40 staff, one phone per pair, so 20 devices. Free tier if they're fine with the watermark, USD 35 if they'd rather not have it.
The plan doesn't fix crowding
If 120 phones join and then all run to task one, the plan is fine and the lawn is not. Two settings in the editor handle that. Shuffling chapters gives each team a different route through the middle of the hunt, and crowd prevention sends a team that finishes a chapter to whichever chapter currently has the fewest people in it. Put the join QR on more than one wall; if the only code is at registration, you've built a queue. There's a longer piece on automatic crowd prevention and one on hosting a 200-person hunt.
On the day, keep the dashboard open. It shows who's in and who's stuck. Download results after the spike, not during it. The countdown timer can't be paused, so if the match on the big screen goes to extra time, stop the game from the dashboard.
Subscribe at admin.playtours.app/subscription. And if you email hello@playtours.app, tell me when the spike is, not just how many guests. The spike picks the plan.
-Mo