Most teams start collecting feature requests the same way: somebody makes a form, pastes the link in the help docs, and the responses pile up in a spreadsheet. That is a perfectly good start. It also stops working at a fairly predictable point, and it helps to know where that point is before you hit it.
This post gives you a feature request form template you can build in any form tool today, explains the three fields most templates leave out, and then covers the moment a form should hand over to a voting board, with honest prices for the boards people usually compare.
The feature request form template
Eight fields. Five are required. Everything else is either optional or answered by the form tool itself.
| # | Field | Type | Required | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What are you trying to do? | Paragraph | Yes | The job, not the feature. “Export invoices for my accountant” beats “add CSV export”. |
| 2 | What do you do today instead? | Paragraph | Yes | The workaround tells you how painful the gap really is. |
| 3 | How often does this come up? | Multiple choice: daily / weekly / monthly / once | Yes | Separates a daily annoyance from a one-off. |
| 4 | What happens if we never build it? | Multiple choice: nothing / I live with it / I look for another tool | Yes | The single best churn signal you will get from a form. |
| 5 | Which part of the product is this about? | Dropdown | Yes | Lets you route and group responses without reading every one. |
| 6 | Screenshot or example | File upload | No | One image saves three follow-up emails. |
| 7 | Can we contact you about this? | Checkbox + email | No | You will want to ask “would this version work?” later. |
| 8 | Plan or account type | Dropdown or hidden field | No | Weights requests by who is asking. Prefill it if your tool supports hidden fields. |
Notice what is missing: a “priority” field. People mark everything as high priority, so the answer carries no information. Fields 3 and 4 give you the same thing without asking for it directly.
The three fields most templates skip
The workaround (field 2). A request with no workaround (“I just don’t do it”) is usually a nice-to-have. A request where the workaround is “I export to Excel every Friday and fix it by hand” is a real cost someone pays every week. Sort by this field and the list reorders itself.
The consequence (field 4). “I look for another tool” is the answer that should reach the product owner the same day. It is also the one most forms never ask for, because it feels awkward to put in front of a customer. Ask it anyway. People answer it honestly.
Who is asking (field 8). Ten requests from free-trial users and two from your largest accounts are not the same signal. If your form tool can prefill a hidden field from the URL, add the account type there so nobody has to type it.
Google Forms can build all eight fields, including a follow-up section for field 4 using “go to section based on answer”. The one gap is hidden fields: a prefilled link works for field 8, but the customer can see and change the value. If that matters, our roundup of Jotform alternatives is a good place to compare form builders that go further.
Where a feature request form stops working
A form is one-directional. Each response lands on its own row, the person who sent it never sees it again, and nobody else sees it at all. That creates three problems, and they show up roughly in this order:
- Duplicates. A few dozen responses in, you notice that “CSV export”, “export to Excel” and “download my data” are the same request from 14 people. Merging them by hand in a spreadsheet works for a while.
- No sense of demand. A form counts submissions, not people who care. The 14 who asked are a fraction of the people who wanted it and never filled in the form, and the form has no way to count them.
- Silence. Customers who asked for something have no way to know you built it, or that you decided not to. That is the part that quietly costs goodwill.
The fix for all three is the same: let people see each other’s requests and vote on them. That is what a feedback board is.
Form vs feedback board: which one you actually need
| Feature request form | Feedback board | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Under ~20 requests a month, internal teams, beta programs | Public products with an active user base |
| Duplicates | You merge them by hand | Users find the existing post and vote instead |
| Measuring demand | Count of submissions | Votes, including from people who would never fill in a form |
| Closing the loop | Manual emails | Status changes notify every voter |
| Private context (plan, screenshots) | Easy | Harder, posts are public by default |
| Cost | Usually free | Free to $79/mo and up, see below |
Plenty of teams run both: the form for private, detailed requests from paying customers, and a public board for everything else. Put a link to the board on the form’s confirmation screen and you get the best of each.
What a feedback board costs in 2026
This is where the choice gets interesting, because the popular boards price on very different axes. These prices were read from each vendor’s pricing page on 26 September 2026.
| Board | Price | What the price scales with |
|---|---|---|
| Canny | Free for 25 tracked users, then Pro from $79/month billed yearly | Tracked users: anyone who posts, votes or comments |
| Featurebase | Free for 1 seat, then Growth at $29 per seat per month, plus $0.49 per AI resolution | Seats on your team, plus AI usage |
| Fider (self-hosted) | Free software (AGPL-3.0), you pay for a server | Nothing. Any number of voters and admins |
Canny is the most polished product of the three. It pulls feedback out of support and sales tools automatically and pushes it into Jira or Linear. The catch is the meter: a tracked user is anyone who takes part, so the bill goes up every time your board gets more popular, which is exactly what you wanted to happen. There is a longer Fider vs Canny breakdown if the tracked-user model is the deciding factor for you.
Featurebase has grown into a full support suite with a changelog, help center, inbox and an AI agent. If you want all of that in one place, the per-seat price is fair. If you only want the voting board, three seats is $87 a month for features you will mostly not open. The Fider vs Featurebase comparison goes through it seat by seat.
Fider is the open-source option: a public board with voting, threaded comments, tags and a roadmap driven by post status. No AI, no support inbox, just the board. Because it is self-hosted, the price is whatever the server costs. You can run it yourself on any VPS with Docker and PostgreSQL, or use a managed one-click setup such as Fider on InstaPods, which is $3/month flat with HTTPS and backups set up and no limit on voters. If you want a feedback board that nobody meters and do not want to run the server yourself, that is the shortest path.
A simple way to decide
- Fewer than 20 requests a month: keep the form. Use the template above and review it weekly.
- You keep merging duplicates by hand: it is time for a board. Keep the form for paying customers and link the board from the confirmation page.
- You need feedback captured from Intercom or Zendesk automatically: that is Canny’s strength, and worth paying for.
- You just want a public board and a roadmap, at a price that does not move: a self-hosted board like Fider does that job for a few dollars a month.
Whichever you choose, the fields in the template still matter. A board with a “What do you do today instead?” prompt in the post description gets far better requests than one with an empty text box.
