Voicebox vs Canny pricing: $1,800 vs $34 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Canny charges $50+ a month to host an upvote button and a board of your own users' ideas. Voicebox is that same board and public roadmap, running on your box, forever. $34, once. Your data is a SQLite file you own, not a plan-capped seat on someone else's cloud.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Canny actually costs over one, two and three years, what Voicebox gives you for $34 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Canny actually costs you

At $50+/mo, one Canny subscription adds up to $600 every year — $1,800 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Voicebox is $34 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $1,766 — and every year after that adds another $600 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Voicebox vs Canny, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $34, once

Public feedback board with upvotes, comments and an auto-populated kanban roadmap, self-hosted. The highlights:

• 📥 Public board — Anyone submits ideas and upvotes with one vote per visitor, plus comment threads on every idea.
• 🛡️ Spam defense built in — Per-IP rate limits on submissions, votes and comments, with vote dedupe enforced by a database UNIQUE constraint.
• 🚦 Status workflow — Open, planned, in progress, shipped and declined-with-reason, with illegal jumps rejected so the roadmap stays true.
• 📋 Public roadmap — Kanban columns for Planned, In progress and Shipped, auto-populated from idea statuses and sorted by votes.

Voicebox costs less than one month of Canny once, and never asks for another dollar as your voter count grows.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $34 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/feedback-roadmap-voting-mvp and run it free.
2. Run it locally or on a $5 VPS. Use desktop mode to try it, or deploy with docker compose up -d when you need the board public.
3. Share your board. Point users at the board homepage or drop the embeddable widget into your app, then set statuses to build the roadmap.

When paying Canny is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Canny's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $50+/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Voicebox is $34, once. For the deeper dive, read the Voicebox vs Canny head-to-head or the full Canny comparison.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Voicebox is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/feedback-roadmap-voting-mvp. The $34 buys the packaged Windows installer with no Node and no terminal; running from source is free.

Where does my feedback data live?
In your own SQLite file on your box. There are no accounts required for voters and no telemetry — nothing goes to anyone else's cloud.

Does it do everything Canny does?
It covers the core: unlimited ideas and voters, public roadmap, merges, pinned replies and an embeddable widget. If that's what you need, it's $34 once instead of $50+ a month.

More on Canny pricing

Voicebox — product page, demo & full feature list · Shipnotes vs Canny pricing · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns