I Deleted Our Canny Subscription. Nothing Bad Happened.

I want to tell you about the $360/month line item I deleted from our company card and never missed.

We'd been on Canny for about 18 months. It was one of those tools that felt important to have even when the numbers didn't support it. We had a board. We had voters. We had a roadmap with statuses and tags and priority scores.

We also had 174 tracked users generating meaningful feedback, out of ~2,400 monthly actives. That's a 7% signal capture rate, and we thought it was good.

We were wrong about what "good" looked like.

What Canny Actually Costs

Canny's pricing is based on "tracked users" - the number of users identified in your feedback board. The Growth plan starts at $79/month for a limited number of tracked users, and scales up fast.

For us, at 174 tracked users, we were on the Business tier: $360/month.

I'm not mad at Canny. It's a solid product. But at some point I opened a spreadsheet and did the math.

$360/month × 12 = $4,320/year.

For 174 users submitting feedback out of 2,400 active.

That's $24.83 per user submitting a single piece of feedback. Per year.

The Feedback We Were Getting Was Fine. But Also Useless.

Here's the part that stung: the feedback on our Canny board was coherent and well-organized. Users voted. Features bubbled up. We had priorities.

But almost every top-voted feature was from power users. The kind of users who will always tell you what they want.

Meanwhile, we had no idea why we were losing the other 93% of users who never touched the board. The ones who just stopped logging in one day.

You can't see churn signals in a feedback board. Feedback boards show you what engaged users want more of. They don't show you what's breaking, confusing, or frustrating the silent majority.

The tool was optimizing for the wrong signal.

What We Switched To

We didn't replace Canny with another board.

We added an embedded feedback widget - we use Palmframe - directly on our product. Users see a small button in the corner. They click it, pick how they're feeling (love, like, dislike, frustrated), and optionally leave a message.

No account required. No new tab. No "go to our feedback portal."

The widget captures the page URL automatically, so every piece of feedback arrives with context: this user was frustrated on the billing settings page. Not just "billing is confusing" with no location.

Within two weeks, we had more feedback than we'd collected in six months on Canny. And critically, it was different feedback - from different users.

The silent majority was no longer silent. Turns out they had opinions. They just weren't going to navigate to a separate website to share them.

What Happened to Feature Prioritization

This is the question everyone asks.

If you don't have a voting board, how do you decide what to build?

Honestly? The same way we did before Canny. We read the feedback. We look for patterns. We talk to users. We make a judgment call.

The difference is that now we're making that judgment call with signal from the full user base, not a 7% self-selected sample of enthusiasts.

We still have a roadmap. It's public on our product's page. Users can see what's planned. We just don't let voting scores make our product decisions for us.

The Things I Miss

The roadmap view in Canny was genuinely nice. Status tracking, moving cards between columns, keeping everything in one place. That part had value.

But not $4,320/year of value. Not for us.

If you're a larger company with a dedicated product ops team and thousands of engaged users driving board submissions, Canny might be worth it. There's a version of this product that makes sense.

For a 5-person team running a SaaS with a few thousand users? You're probably paying for a tool that's optimized for a problem you don't have.

The Takeaway

Before you renew your feedback board subscription, ask yourself:

• What percentage of active users actually submit feedback on the board?
• What percentage of your churn could you explain using only the feedback you have?
• Are you building for the vocal minority or the full user base?

If the answers make you uncomfortable, you might not need a better board. You might need a different approach entirely.

Feedback boards are great for communities. Embedded widgets are great for products. Most SaaS companies are products pretending to have communities.

See how Palmframe compares to Canny →