Run your own public roadmap — feedback, votes, and changelog, self-hosted
The complete guide to public roadmaps on software you own: the tracked-user meters, the open-source boards, why the feedback loop compounds, and what a buy-once board covers.
A public feedback loop — users post ideas, vote, watch the roadmap, see the changelog — is one of the highest-leverage systems a product can bolt on. It converts complaints into structured signal, turns "did they ship it?" emails into a page, and quietly proves the product is alive. This is the complete guide to running that loop on software you own.
The pricing trap built into this category
Hosted feedback tools meter by tracked users — and tracked users only accumulate. Every voter who ever touches your board inflates the count permanently; success is the thing that raises your bill.
- Canny — the free plan caps at 25 tracked users; Pro is $99/month for the first 100, and the ladder on the same page climbs toward $474/month as voters accumulate (checked 2026-07-21 — the old $19 tier is gone).
- Featurebase — $29 to $99 per seat per month, plus $0.49 per AI resolution, plus $69/month to remove their branding (read 2026-07-21, re-read 5 September 2026). Every paid tier is priced billed-yearly and no monthly rate is shown at all — Growth $29, Professional $59, Enterprise $99, each "billed yearly" — so the seat price and the annual commitment are the same decision here, not two. A free plan sits below them at one seat.
- Nolt — (its pricing page answered HTTP 403 to our 5 September 2026 re-read, so these figures keep their earlier date) — the fairer meter: flat $29/month (one board; $348 billed annually) or $69/month Pro — unlimited users, but still recurring, and one board on the base tier (read 2026-07-21).
The open-source boards, honestly
- Fider — the best-known: posts, votes, comments, clean look, Docker deploy. It is the board only — no roadmap view, no changelog — on a Go/Postgres stack you operate. Free under AGPL-3.0, verified 5 September 2026 at the project repository rather than inferred from the site, which names no licence — and the repository is active, not archived. Its hosted side publishes a free plan with a fair-use limit of 250 feedback items and a Pro plan at $25 (read 5 September 2026).
- Astuto — no longer a live recommendation, and we are removing the link rather than leaving it. It offered boards plus a roadmap view on Rails. On 5 September 2026 its repository is archived (AGPL-3.0, last commit 9 January 2026, at github.com/astuto/astuto), and
astuto.iono longer belongs to the project: it now redirects, via one hop, to an unrelated Vietnamese football-results and betting site. We had described it as "actively developed". It is not, and the old link now sends readers somewhere they did not ask to go — which is a worse failure than a stale price, so the URL is gone and the repository is cited in its place. The code is still there under AGPL-3.0 if you want to run an archived project knowingly; that is a different decision from adopting a maintained one.
If the board alone covers you and Docker is comfortable, Fider is a strong free answer — said plainly, because it is true. The full field is in the feedback-boards guide.
Why the loop, not the board, is the point
The teams that get value from these tools run all three surfaces as one motion: the board collects and ranks demand; the roadmap shows judgment — what you chose and where it stands; the changelog closes the loop, entry linked back to the request it resolves. That last link is the compounding step: a user who watches their idea travel from posted to shipped becomes the user who files the next one. A board without the loop is a suggestion box; nobody trusts suggestion boxes.
The owned option
Votera is our entry, built as that full loop: feedback boards where one vote per person is enforced at the database level; a public roadmap Kanban of your own statuses; a changelog with New/Improved/Fixed tags, each entry linkable back to the idea it resolves; comments with staff replies and admin-only internal notes; and a one-script-tag widget that embeds the board in your app. Voting needs no signup — an anonymous per-browser key removes the wall between a user and their first vote. Unlimited ideas, voters, and boards; your brand, not a vendor's; one payment. On Canny's ladder, a successful roadmap costs more every quarter — on Votera, success is free.
Try the Votera demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
The honest limits
From Votera's own page: voter identity is an anonymous per-browser cookie key by default — one vote per browser, with an email gate and verified voting as the opt-in escalations, not a full account system (single sign-on hand-off into your own app is still on the roadmap). A voter is emailed when an idea ships only if they opted in to that one idea; there is deliberately no mailing list and no bulk mail, and the changelog is the public record. Team members are managed in the app, with roles and single-use invite links. If per-user identity across devices or a broadcast notification list are hard requirements today, the hosted tools have them and Votera does not.
The honest chooser
- Board only, Docker-comfortable, free: Fider.
- The full loop — board, roadmap, changelog — owned once, no tracked-user meter: Votera — the live demo is a complete board you can drive: votes, statuses, comments, changelog — $59, once.
- Zero ops, budget for the meter: Nolt is the fairest hosted deal; Canny is the deepest tool — priced above, sources linked.
Launching a board that doesn't look abandoned
The failure mode of every feedback board is emptiness — a bare "no ideas yet" page teaches visitors the product is unloved. The fix takes an afternoon: seed the board yourself with the eight or ten requests users already email you (they are real demand — posting them is bookkeeping, not theater), set two or three to Planned and one to In progress so the roadmap shows motion, and write the first changelog entry for whatever you shipped last week. Then put the embed widget where users already are — inside the app beats a marketing page — and answer the first external ideas fast; the first commenter who gets a staff reply becomes the board's best advertisement.
One more honest sentence: this store runs its own roadmap on Votera — the demo link above is the production instance. We are our own reference customer, which is either reassuring or circular; you can click it and judge.
Votera is also one of the four apps on Ownware Cloud — hosted for $12/month, licence yours after a year. The self-hosted Canny alternative is the pricing-trap argument on its own. Every hosted-tool price above is tracked, dated and sourced, in the Price Observatory.