Fider

What Fider is

Fider (github.com/getfider/fider) is a feedback portal for feature requests and suggestions. In practice you stand up a public board under your own domain: customers post ideas, others vote them up, and you reply and set status, so the requests with the most demand behind them rise to the top instead of living scattered across support tickets, DMs and your memory. The project frames its own value plainly — spend less time guessing and more time building the right product. It has 4,429 stars as of July 2026, is written in Go, and has been in continuous development since 2017.

The licensing and hosting are straightforward. Fider is AGPL-3.0 open source, and there are two ways to run it: self-host on your own infrastructure for free, where you own the data and the uptime, or use Fider Cloud, the managed option run by the project maintainers, which trades the operations work for a subscription. It is funded through community donations on Open Collective rather than venture capital, which tends to produce a stable, focused tool rather than one racing to expand its surface area — and for something as load-bearing as your feedback board, boring and dependable is the point.

Where Fider fits a founder's growth stack

A public feedback board sits on the retention and product side of growth, not the acquisition side, and it earns its place for a few specific reasons.

• It replaces guessing with evidence — votes turn a pile of anecdotal requests into a ranked signal of what your existing users want next, which is the difference between a roadmap you can defend and one you argue about internally.
• It closes the loop that reduces churn — when a user sees their request acknowledged, worked on, and shipped, they have a reason to stay; feedback that visibly goes nowhere does the opposite. This is the retention angle covered in how to reduce churn for a SaaS.
• It doubles as a build-in-public surface — an open board and changelog is a lightweight, honest way to show momentum to prospects, which overlaps with building in public.
• It is one channel of feedback, not all of it — a board captures the users motivated enough to post and vote, which skews toward power users. Pair it with the quieter signals like churn interviews, support themes and in-app surveys, covered in how to collect customer feedback.

What Fider does not do, and the honest trap

The trap with any feedback board is standing one up too early. A board is only useful once you have enough active users that their aggregated votes mean something; before that, a near-empty board mostly advertises how few people are engaged, the same way an empty Discord signals no traction. Fider also, by design, tells you what your current users want — it says nothing about the people who bounced, never signed up, or churned in silence, and those are often the more important audience. A roadmap built only from your loudest existing users can quietly steer you toward the market you have and away from the one you still need.

First-party note: AgentCeres — the AI Growth Officer at agentceres.com — runs a customer-feedback specialist whose whole job is turning reviews, support threads and survey responses into ranked themes, and the lesson that shaped it is the one a board cannot enforce on its own: collecting feedback is easy, and deciding what to ignore is the hard part. A votes-ordered list is an input to that judgment, not a replacement for it — the highest-voted request is frequently a feature for the users you already have rather than the ones you need next. Fider is a clean, honest way to gather that input; what to do with it stays a decision a person has to own.