Open source feedback boards, and what they cost to run

How do the open source alternatives compare?

Licences and paid-tier prices re-checked against Fider's, Astuto's, LogChimp's and ClearFlask's own licence files, and against LogChimp's pricing page, on 23 August 2026. Star counts and repository activity were read on 20 August 2026 and drift daily. Hosting estimates assume one small VPS running the app and its database, plus a transactional email account on a free tier.

Going through the options

Fider, and start here

AGPL-3.0, 4,475 stars, last pushed 9 August 2026, with v0.36.1 released on 3 July. It gives you voting, a public roadmap, private boards and your own domain. You supply Docker, PostgreSQL 12 or later, and an SMTP, Mailgun or SES sender, which realistically means a small VPS at around $6 to $12 a month all in. Two honest catches. There is no changelog feature at all, which for a lot of people is half the reason they wanted one of these. And the security work is yours: v0.35.0 fixed a critical authentication vulnerability, v0.36.0 fixed SSRF and cross-site scripting, and v0.36.1 was more of the same, all inside three months. Nobody emails you when one lands.

Astuto, which is dead

The repository was archived and made read-only on 8 February 2026. The maintainer posted his own end-of-life notice and now points people at Fider. The hosted version ran for under a year and shut down, and the last meaningful release was March 2025. It still ranks well and it is still recommended in older roundups, which is exactly why it is worth saying plainly: do not start here in 2026. A Rails and Node dependency stack with no more security patches is a liability, not a saving.

LogChimp, which is open core

Genuinely active, last pushed 20 August 2026, and AGPL-3.0 as far as the licence file goes. The catch is what sits behind the paid tier, and it is not a nicety: Boards, Roadmaps and Comments are Pro-only at $24 a month billed yearly, on the self-managed build as well as the cloud. The free self-hosted version gives you posts, customers, one admin role and a custom domain. Calling that a free and open source feedback board is a stretch, since the parts that make it a feedback board are the parts you pay for.

ClearFlask

Apache-2.0, 448 stars, last pushed 5 August 2026. Alive, and a permissive licence rather than a copyleft one, which matters to some buyers. Very small though, and a project this size is a bet on one or two people continuing to care.

GitHub Issues and Discussions

Not open source, but free on public repositories and worth including because so many teams try it first. Nothing to host, nothing to patch, GitHub absorbs the spam, and the threaded email is better than most paid tools manage. It has one hard problem as a customer-facing surface: posting requires a GitHub account, which most buyers of a consumer app do not have and will not create. There is also no changelog, no real voting beyond reactions, and every complaint is public, permanent and indexed against your product's name.

Docket, $99 once

Ours, so read it with the appropriate suspicion. Not open source, but you get the source and you own your copy: a GitHub repository in your own account, on your own domain, with every item stored as a Markdown file. The relevant difference from everything above is that there is no database and no server, so there is nothing to stand up, patch or back up, and no CVE to notice. It ships a changelog, which Fider and LogChimp do not, and scheduled jobs that draft the replies and write it for you.

Which open source alternative should you choose?

Three questions, and they settle almost every case.

• "Free" is a licence, not a bill. A small VPS and a mail sender is $6 to $12 a month, which is $216 to $432 over three years. That is real, and it is still less than every hosted tool here.
• Who applies the security patches? Fider shipped three security releases in three months. If nobody on your side is watching that repository, self-hosting is a risk you are taking rather than a cost you are saving.
• Do you need a changelog? Neither Fider nor LogChimp has one. If telling customers what shipped is half the point, that rules out most of this page.

Frequently asked questions