What feedback tools actually cost

Every vendor in this category publishes a monthly price, and every comparison written about them stops at the annual one. Nobody publishes the three-year number, because for a subscription business the three-year number is the least flattering way to describe the product. This page is that number, for every tool, with a calculator.

All prices were checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 20 August 2026, and Canny.io's tracked-user ladder against its own help centre on 22 August 2026. Where something could not be confirmed, this page says so instead of guessing.

What does each tool cost per year?

Entry paid tier, at the cheapest published billing, for one product.

Two of those six rows are not really annual figures at all, and that is the point of the next two sections.

Each of the four subscription tools has its own teardown, with what the tier actually includes and what the add-ons cost: Frill.co pricing, UserJot pricing, Nolt.io pricing and Featurebase pricing.

Why is a three-year bill not three times year one?

Because two of the pricing models grow while you use them.

Canny.io prices by tracked user. Their own pricing page defines that as anyone who posts, votes or comments. Those users accumulate permanently. Nobody untracks themselves by losing interest, so the count only moves in one direction.

The published effect, on Canny.io's own help centre rather than its pricing page: billed yearly, the price runs from $79 a month at 100 tracked users to $1,079 a month at 5,000. Billed monthly it runs from $99 to $1,349. All nineteen increments in between are published, which no comparison page in this category quotes. Canny.io's pricing page also states that exceeding your limit means Canny.io "automatically upgrade[s] you to the next tier" with a prorated charge unless you set a spend limit, and that once that spend limit is reached Canny.io "will stop tracking feedback from new users".

Read that last clause carefully, because it is the trade the model forces: either the bill rises with your success, or the board stops recording it.

Featurebase prices per seat, at $29 per seat per month billed yearly. That is $348 for you, $696 for two of you, $1,044 for three, before the per-resolution AI charge and before badge removal.

So the honest three-year totals, for one product and a small team, are these:

What is the most expensive line in the category?

Not the board. The badge.

Featurebase charges $69 a month to remove its badge, as an add-on purchasable only on Professional at $59 per seat per month or on Enterprise. Badge removal alone is therefore $828 a year, which is more than most of the tools on this page cost in total.

Canny.io places it on the Business tier only, shown with a dollar icon rather than a tick, so it is a paid add-on on top of a custom-priced plan. Frill.co ticks "remove tagline" on all tiers, but full white labelling is a separate add-on listed as included at Growth, $136 a month billed yearly.

Nolt.io's position could not be confirmed, so this page does not assert one.

Before you commit to any of them, two things are worth checking that no pricing page mentions: what your data actually looks like on the way out, in read your export file before you need it, and what leaving costs in practice, in migrating off Canny.io.

The pattern is consistent enough to be a design decision rather than an accident: the thing you most want to remove is priced as though it were a feature.

What about the cost of building it yourself?

On 19 August 2026 Canny.io published a careful piece costing a do-it-yourself feedback portal: twenty-five features priced line by line, landing on roughly 420 engineering hours, about $31,500, plus $550 a month to run at the compliance end. It names Claude Code directly and makes an argument worth taking seriously: "the code was never the hard part", and the hours go to review, testing, permissions and the syncs.

It is the most honest costing anyone in this category has published. It is also, conspicuously, the only cost comparison they run, and it runs in the one direction that flatters a subscription.

Set the two side by side and the picture is less obvious than either party would like. Against $31,500 of engineering, $948 a year looks cheap. Against $2,844 over three years, so does buying something once.

What does self-hosting cost instead?

Not nothing, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

The most honest number published is UserJot's, and they publish it while arguing against self-hosting: a self-hosted Fider deployment costs $70 to $125 a month in infrastructure before any engineering time, made up of Postgres, a host, transactional email, monitoring and TLS. They put the ongoing effort at five hours a month.

At those numbers, self-hosting a database-backed board is not cheaper than a $22 to $29 subscription. It becomes cheaper in exactly two situations: when the hosted price grows with your success, or when the self-hosted thing has no server in it.

Docket is the second case. It is a static site plus two small endpoints, so there is no Postgres to run, no container, no mail server, and the free tier of any static host covers it. That is an architectural difference, not a pricing claim, and it is the only reason the $99 stays $99.

The full version of that trade, including the case for not self-hosting at all, is in self-hosting a feature request board. What running one actually costs month to month is in what a self-hosted support centre costs to run.

Where to go next

This page is the overview. Each part of it has a page of its own.

• The two tools that publish a ladder rather than a price. Productboard pricing, where the minimums are the part the pricing page buries, and UserVoice pricing, where there is no published price at all.
• The Canny.io arithmetic in full. What three years of Canny.io costs is the reply to their own build-versus-buy piece, and tracked users never reset draws the whole nineteen-step ladder, which is published on their help centre rather than their pricing page.
• The mechanisms that catch people out. Removing the badge, which on one tool costs more per year than most tools cost in total, and per-seat, per-tracked-user, per-workspace, which is one surprise per model.
• What happens under stress. What happens to your bill when a request goes viral, which is the scenario that turns a pricing model from an abstraction into a number.
• What you are actually buying, and what you keep. What "you can export your data" actually means, and your public roadmap is a URL you do not own.
• The two alternatives to paying anyone monthly. Should you just build it yourself with a coding agent?, answered honestly in both directions, and one-time purchase software, where the finding is that the phrase rarely means what a buyer assumes.

How should you actually decide?

Three questions, in this order.

1. Does the price grow with something you cannot control? Tracked users and seats both do. Model three years at the size you hope to be, not the size you are. 2. What does removing the badge cost? Check it before you buy, not after. On one tool it is $828 a year. 3. What happens to the bill if the board works? If the honest answer is "it goes up a lot", you are renting a meter, not a tool.

Frequently asked questions