If you are looking at Canny for a public roadmap or a feature-voting board, the number that decides your bill is not $79. It is the number of people who use the thing.
Canny's meter is the tracked user, and their pricing page defines it plainly:
A tracked user is someone who has given feedback. This can be via creating a post or voting/commenting on a post.
So it is not everyone who visits your board. It is everyone who participates — posts an idea, votes on one, leaves a comment. Which is a fair definition, and also exactly the number you spend the rest of your week trying to increase.
The allowances
- Free — 25 tracked users
- Pro — $79/mo billed yearly, about $98.75 billed monthly, starting at 100 tracked users
- Business — custom, from 5,000
A hundred participants is not an ambitious target. It is one decent week after you put a "Feature requests" link in your product's navigation, or one launch announcement to a mailing list of any size.
The part worth reading twice
What happens when you cross the line is where this gets interesting, because Canny gives you two options and both have a cost.
If you have not set a spend limit, Canny automatically upgrades you to the next tier once you exceed your allowance, charging a prorated amount for the rest of the billing period.
If you have set a spend limit, the automatic upgrade doesn't happen. Instead, once you reach the limit, feedback tracking from new users pauses.
Read that second one carefully, because it is the one that matters. The mechanism protecting you from a surprise invoice works by no longer counting new people who try to give you feedback.
That is not a gotcha and I don't think it is badly designed — a spend limit that didn't stop spending would be useless, and Canny is upfront about both behaviours on the pricing page. But it does leave you choosing between two things you'd rather not choose between:
| Your choice | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| No spend limit | The bill moves on its own when a launch goes well |
| Spend limit | The tool stops picking up new participants at your busiest moment |
The awkward part is when it happens. Both branches trigger at the same moment — the week a launch lands, a post gets shared, or a customer emails your board link around their company. The point at which your feedback programme is finally working is the point at which you either pay more or start collecting less.
This is the category norm, not a Canny quirk
Worth being fair: nearly every tool in this space meters something that grows when the tool succeeds.
- Beamer bills changelog by monthly active users, defined as anyone who loads a page containing the script — not anyone who opens the changelog. We wrote about that one separately.
- Survicate bills by response, with overage fees past the allowance.
- Marker.io caps page views at 5,000/mo on its entry plan.
The pattern is consistent enough to be worth a habit: before buying any of them, find the sentence that defines the unit, then work out what that number becomes in a year if the tool does exactly what you bought it to do.
Where we sit, and where Canny still wins
We built Feedback Magic flat. A voting board is one of six widget types included in the plan — $29/mo for five widgets on one project, $79/mo for twenty-five across five projects — and voters, commenters, responses and page views are unlimited and never counted. The same $79 covers a board with twelve participants and a board with twelve thousand. There is no spend limit to set, because there is nothing metered to limit.
Three honest caveats, because a comparison that wins every row persuades nobody:
- Canny's free tier is real and ours does not exist. 25 tracked users, free, forever. We have a 7-day trial and then a plan. If you are validating an idea and 25 participants would tell you what you need, that is a better answer than paying us.
- Canny is deeper at this specific job. They have spent years on public roadmaps — status workflows, changelog links, prioritisation, an integration catalogue far broader than our seven adapters. Our board is one of six surfaces sharing a dashboard, which is the right trade only if you actually want the other five.
- They have years of customers and public reviews. We are new. No amount of writing changes that, and it is a legitimate thing to weigh.
If a voting board is the only thing you need and you need it to be excellent, Canny is a good product and the metering may never bite you. If you want the board and surveys and a changelog and bug reports and testimonials, and you would rather not have four bills that each grow when your customers engage, that is the case we make on our comparison page — with the rows where they beat us left in.
Every Canny figure here was read off their own pricing page on 27 July 2026, and the definition of a tracked user is quoted from it. Pricing changes; go and check before you buy, including checking us.
On the numbers: every competitor price here was read off that vendor's own pricing page on July 27, 2026, not from a comparison listicle — three of the six we first checked were materially wrong. Pricing changes; if you are reading this much later, check the vendor's page and tell us if we are stale.
All six surfaces, from $29/mo — and the bill doesn't grow when they're used → Feedback, surveys, visual annotation, changelog, a voting board and testimonials on one flat plan. Embed them or send them as a link. Responses, visitors and page views are never metered. The like-for-like comparison is Pro at $79 against about $261/mo across four vendors. 7-day free trial, no card.