What happens to your bill when a request goes viral

What happens to your bill when a request goes viral depends entirely on how your feedback tool prices itself. Per seat, per workspace and one-time pricing do not notice a traffic spike at all. Per tracked user, the model Canny.io uses, notices immediately, and the effect never resets.

The tracked-user figures below were checked against Canny.io's own help centre on 22 August 2026, the same ladder used in the site's three-year pricing comparison.

What actually happens when a request goes viral?

Picture the ordinary version of virality for a feedback board: one request gets linked from somewhere with an audience, a few thousand people arrive over a day or two, and a meaningful share of them vote or leave a comment before moving on. Nothing about the product changed. The team is the same size it was last week. The only thing that changed is how many people touched the board.

For most pricing models, that is the end of the story. For one of them, it is the beginning.

What does a viral request do to each pricing model?

The rest of this page works through why, starting with the model where it actually matters.

What does per-tracked-user pricing actually do to the bill?

Canny.io's own pricing page defines a tracked user as anyone who posts, votes or comments. That definition matters more than it sounds: a visitor who votes once during a viral weekend and never comes back still counts, permanently. The number only rises.

Canny.io's help centre publishes the full curve in small increments, for exactly this reason. Billed monthly, here is what crossing from a few hundred tracked users into a few thousand looks like:

A board that sat at a few hundred tracked users before the viral post, and crosses into the low thousands because of it, is not looking at a rounding error. On this monthly basis, that is the bill roughly tripling. Billed yearly the shape is identical, just lower at every step: $79 a month at 100 tracked users, up to $1,079 a month at 5,000. Never compare the two columns against each other; the rise is real on either one, but they are not the same number.

Canny.io's pricing page is direct about what happens next. Exceed your limit and Canny.io "automatically upgrade[s] you to the next tier" with a prorated charge, unless you have set a spend limit.

What happens once you hit a spend limit?

Set a spend limit and the automatic upgrade stops. So does the tracking: once the limit is reached, Canny.io "will stop tracking feedback from new users". That is a genuine control, not a trap. It caps the bill exactly where you tell it to.

But read what it actually does. The board keeps recording everyone who was already tracked before the limit was reached. Everyone who arrives after that point, including the tail end of the same viral wave that pushed you there, is not tracked at all. Their votes and comments do not attach to anyone the system is counting. A spend limit is not a choice between a big bill and a small one. It is a choice between a bigger bill and a board that stops listening to new people at the exact moment the most new people are turning up.

That trade-off, not the existence of the fee, is the interesting part of this pricing model.

Why doesn't a per-seat bill move?

Featurebase prices per seat, at $29 per seat per month billed yearly. A viral request does not add a seat. Your team is the same three or five people it was the week before, so the bill is the same three or five seats' worth it always was. Two thousand new voters and a few hundred comments do not touch the number at all.

This is worth stating as plainly as the tracked-user problem, because it is the honest counterpoint to it: per-seat pricing is genuinely immune to this scenario. It only moves when you hire.

Why doesn't per-workspace or one-time pricing move either?

Frill.co, UserJot and Nolt.io each price by the workspace or the subscription, rather than by who shows up inside it. A viral weekend changes what is on the board. It does not change what the board costs. Docket's one-time price works the same way, for the same underlying reason, just permanently: $99 once, and there is no second bill to move, regardless of how many people ever vote.

Is per-tracked-user pricing actually unfair?

Not straightforwardly, and it would be dishonest to leave this page implying it is. A board that just absorbed a few thousand new visitors in a weekend is doing real work: more storage, more spam and duplicate filtering, more moderation load, more of everything a vendor's infrastructure has to carry quietly in the background so the board stays usable. The pricing model that rises with that load is also the model that pays for the infrastructure that survives it.

Put simply: the model that punishes virality is the same model that funds the vendor to handle it. Whether that trade is worth it to you depends on what you would rather have certainty over, your bill or your capacity.

For the full three-year picture across every tool in this category, see what feedback tools actually cost. For what a tracked user actually is and why the count never falls back down once it rises, see tracked users never reset. For a fuller Canny.io-specific cost breakdown, see three years of Canny.io.

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