Quick answer
Yes — Voicebox is a one-time-purchase alternative to Canny. It costs $34 once, while Canny runs $50+/mo — about $600 per year, every year. Public feedback board with upvotes, comments and an auto-populated kanban roadmap, self-hosted. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Canny's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Voicebox if you are an individual or small team paying Canny $50+/mo for work your own machine can do. Voicebox costs less than one month of Canny once, and never asks for another dollar as your voter count grows.
Stay with Canny if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Voicebox does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| Voicebox | Canny | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $34 once | $50+/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $34 | $600+ |
| Ideas / voters | Unlimited | Plan-capped |
| Public roadmap | Yes | Yes |
| Merge duplicates | Yes | Yes |
| Official pinned replies | Yes | Yes |
| Anonymous voting | Yes | Limited |
| Self-hosted | Yes | No |
| 5-year cost | $34 | $3,000 |
Where Canny still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Canny's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Canny is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Voicebox wins
- Price, permanently. $34 once versus $600/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- 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.
The math
Voicebox costs less than one month of Canny once, and never asks for another dollar as your voter count grows.
- After 1 year: Voicebox has cost you $34 total — Canny has cost $600.
- After 3 years: Voicebox is still $34 — the subscription is at $1,800.
- After 5 years: Voicebox is still $34 — the subscription is at $3,000.
Common 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.
Try Voicebox — $34, one time
Or get Voicebox plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.