Self-hosted Canny alternative: own your feedback board with Fider

Every product eventually needs a place for customers to say what they want next -- and a way to tell real signal from the loudest single email. That public feedback board has quietly become its own paid SaaS category. Canny and UserVoice will happily run one for you, meter it by admin seat or tracked user, and keep the voting data -- the clearest read you'll ever get on what customers actually want -- sitting on their servers. Fider is the same board, self-hosted, with your roadmap signal and your users' accounts living in a database you control.

What Fider is

Fider is an open-source feedback and feature-voting platform. It's a genuine, full-featured product board, not a stripped-down toy: customers post ideas, everyone votes on them, threads of discussion form under each post, and you respond with a status that pushes the conversation forward. It's built as a fast Go backend with a React front end, and the hosted vendors sell more or less exactly this shape of thing. The whole loop -- post, vote, discuss, decide -- happens in public, so customers watch their request move rather than wondering whether it vanished into a support inbox.

The difference is where the walls are. The hosted incumbents put the pieces that make a board genuinely useful -- private boards, SSO, custom branding -- behind per-seat plans that climb as your team grows. Fider ships those in the box, because there's no plan for it to gate. You run the whole thing, or we run it for you.

The features that actually matter

• A public board with real upvotes. Anyone can post an idea, and everyone else votes it up. The vote count, not whoever emailed you most recently, is what ranks your backlog.
• Status responses that close the loop. Mark a post Planned, Started, Completed, or Declined, write a short reply, and Fider emails everyone who voted for it. The board becomes a two-way channel instead of a suggestion box.
• Comments and discussion. Every post has a thread, so you can ask the clarifying question that turns a vague "make it faster" into something you can actually build.
• Tags, search, and sorting that surfaces momentum. Tag posts by area or component and sort by Trending, Most Wanted, or Most Recent to see where demand genuinely is rather than what's merely new.
• Passwordless sign-in and social login. Fider signs people in with an emailed magic link, and you can additionally enable Google, Facebook, GitHub, or any custom OAuth2 provider. There's no password for your customers to forget.
• Private, invite-only boards. Flip the instance to private so only members you invite can view and vote -- internal roadmaps, closed betas, paying-customers-only feedback. This is squarely a paid feature elsewhere.
• Your branding and your own domain. Set the logo, the name, and custom CSS, and serve it from your own domain. It reads as part of your product, not a bolted-on third-party widget with someone else's name in the footer.

Why self-host it instead of the hosted version

Your data stays yours. A feedback board is a map of everything your customers wish your product did, tied to their email addresses. That's competitive intelligence and a customer list in one. Self-hosted, it lives in your Postgres database and never leaves -- fully exportable, never mined, never held hostage by a plan downgrade.

The cost doesn't scale per seat. Canny and UserVoice price by admins or tracked users, so the bill grows precisely as the tool gets more useful to you. A self-hosted board costs the same whether ten people use it or ten thousand -- it's just a small app and a database.

You control it end to end. Custom CSS, your own domain, private mode, webhooks that fire into Slack or Discord the moment a post lands, and a REST API with API keys so you can pull posts and votes into your own tooling. No feature is dangled behind an upsell, because there's no upsell.

Who it's for

• SaaS and indie product teams who want a public roadmap and a way to prioritize by demand instead of by whoever shouts loudest -- without adding a per-seat line item that grows with the team.
• Open-source maintainers who need somewhere structured for feature requests to land and be voted on, separate from the noise of a GitHub issue tracker.
• Agencies and internal tools teams running a private, invite-only board for one client or one department, where the feedback is confidential and can't sit on a third party's servers.

The honest setup notes

Self-hosting Fider is real infrastructure, and we'd rather be straight about it. It needs a PostgreSQL database alongside the app, and the two have to be wired together correctly. It needs a JWT secret and won't start without one. And the sharp edge that catches most people: Fider signs everyone in by emailed magic link, so it doesn't work at all until SMTP works. Point it at a mail server that doesn't exist and it won't even boot -- and if it does, the first-run setup screen is the only session you'll ever get. On top of that you own backups, updates when a new image ships, and a little RAM headroom -- roughly a gigabyte covers the app and its database.

None of that is exotic, but it's a standing chore -- a database, a mail server, a backup routine, and an eye on updates -- for what is, in the end, a voting board. So you can wire all of it up yourself, or let us run it.

Deploy it in one click

Rolling your own means provisioning a host, running Postgres, generating secrets, configuring SMTP so sign-in works, putting a reverse proxy and TLS in front, and then owning every update and backup from there on.

On Caliber Node it's one click. We stand up Fider with its database already attached, the required secrets generated, TLS and the domain wired up, and managed mail relayed so the magic-link sign-in works on first visit instead of leaving you stranded on the setup screen. You still get the whole thing -- real logs, SFTP into the container, and your data exportable whenever you want it. Updates and backups are ours to run, not another standing item on your calendar. When you're ready, deploy Fider in one click and skip straight to collecting feedback.

First run

1. Open your new Fider instance and complete the setup screen -- name your board, set your logo, and create the first admin account.
2. Confirm the sign-in email is arriving (on Caliber Node it's already relayed for you); the magic-link login is how everyone, including you, gets in.
3. Decide whether the board is public or private under Settings, and add your first tags for the areas you want to organize feedback by.
4. Seed it with two or three real posts so the first visitor sees a living board rather than an empty one, and share the URL with your customers.
5. Watch the votes land, then respond to your first request with a status -- every voter gets the update, and the loop is closed.

The bigger picture

The list of what your customers want built next shouldn't be something you rent, or something a vendor can read over your shoulder and price by the seat. It's one of the most valuable signals you have, and owning the place it lives is worth the small amount of infrastructure underneath. Fider makes that ownership practical, and hosting it with us makes it a click. Self-hosting keeps it yours; letting us host it keeps it easy -- and either way, the votes and the accounts stay in a database you can walk away with.

Deploy Fider in a few minutes →

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