Canny costs $79/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $2,844 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$79/month ($948/yr) is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Shipnotes: the pay-once alternative
Shipnotes does the same core job for $49, once. Self-hosted changelog + roadmap + feature voting with email subscribers and an embeddable widget.
| Shipnotes | Canny | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $79/month ($948/yr) |
| Cost over 3 years | $49 | ~$2,844 |
| Changelog + roadmap + voting | Yes | Yes |
| Anonymous voting (no signup wall) | Yes | No |
| "What's new" widget | Included | Higher tiers |
| Email notifications | Yes, via your own SMTP | Yes, their sender |
| Your data | One SQLite file on your box | Their cloud |
| Source code | MIT, yours | Closed |
Canny costs $79 every month. Shipnotes pays for itself in 19 days — then your changelog is free for the life of your product.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Canny's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Shipnotes is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Shipnotes — $49, once
Self-hosted changelog + roadmap + feature voting with email subscribers and an embeddable widget.