Canny bills by tracked user, and its ladder has twenty published steps. The calculator below prices any count, and the definition that decides your count comes before it.
Further down are the numbers no pricing page prints. Of 923 live Canny sites read on 3 October 2026, 300 pay for an active subscription, and every board that does not pay is hidden from search.
Every price below was read on Canny's own pricing page and in their own help centre on 9 September 2026.
What is a tracked user?
A tracked user is far more people than you would guess, and not the same set as your paying customers. That gap is what makes every number on this page get misread, so it is worth reading slowly.
A tracked user is anybody with a post, a vote or a comment attributed to them.
Three groups inside that definition surprise people, and all three are Canny's own documentation rather than a reading of it.
A person an admin voted on behalf of counts. A common workflow is that a customer emails you, you add their vote to the board so it is not lost, and that person is now tracked although they never visited.
A person their automated tooling discovered in a support conversation counts.
Your own team counts. An admin who posts, votes or comments is a tracked user and appears on your invoice.
The meter counts participation, and several of the ways participation happens are things you do rather than things your customers do.
The demo is open with no account and no email if reading about it is not enough.
What does it cost at my number?
Put in the number of tracked users you expect and it gives you Canny's own published price at that step beside VoteFirst's.
Enter a number to see both prices.
If the box above is not working, the whole ladder is printed below it, so nothing on this page depends on the script.
What is the full published ladder?
The full published ladder is twenty steps, from Canny's help centre, Canny's billing plans, read again on 3 October 2026, and matching their own pricing page code.
| Tracked users | Pro monthly | Pro yearly, per month |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | Free | Free |
| 100 | $99 | $79 |
| 200 | $161 | $129 |
| 300 | $224 | $179 |
| 400 | $286 | $229 |
| 500 | $349 | $279 |
| 600 | $411 | $329 |
| 700 | $474 | $379 |
| 800 | $536 | $429 |
| 900 | $599 | $479 |
| 1,000 | $661 | $529 |
| 1,250 | $724 | $579 |
| 1,500 | $786 | $629 |
| 1,750 | $849 | $679 |
| 2,000 | $911 | $729 |
| 2,250 | $974 | $779 |
| 2,500 | $1,036 | $829 |
| 3,000 | $1,099 | $879 |
| 4,000 | $1,224 | $979 |
| 5,000 | $1,349 | $1,079 |
Free stops at 25 tracked users. Business publishes no price and you talk to somebody.
Above 5,000 there is no published figure, so the calculator stops there too.
How has Canny's price changed?
Canny has changed its meter twice since 2018: tracked users until 2022, admin seats from 2022, and tracked users again from 2025, each change announced on its own blog (March 2022, June 2025).
| First capture showing it | Plans and prices a month, billed monthly (billed yearly) |
|---|---|
| June 2018 | Starter $50 for 100 tracked users, then $20 for each 100 more; Growth $200 for 1,000, then $100 for each 1,000 more; Business quoted |
| February 2023 | Free; Growth $400 ($360) with 5 admin seats, $40 for each more; a $100 Startup Offer; Business quoted |
| December 2023 | Free; Starter $99 ($79) with 3 admin seats; Growth $399 ($359) with 5; Business quoted |
| July 2025 | Free for 25 tracked users; Core from ($19) and Pro from ($79), each at 100 tracked users; Business quoted |
| July 2026 | Free; Pro from ($79); Business quoted. Core is gone from the page |
The 2018 prices held in every capture to January 2022. The Startup Offer left between the February and March 2023 captures, Starter and the $399 Growth arrived between the November and December 2023 captures, and Core left between the June and July 2026 captures. The captures from July 2025 on print only the yearly prices.
What happens when I cross a step?
You move up, automatically, unless you have set a spend limit.
Canny states it plainly in their help centre. They will increase the price to the next increment when the limit is exceeded, and no further increase happens until the next increment after that. If no spend limit is set they upgrade the account and charge a prorated amount for the rest of the billing period.
The spend limit is worth understanding before you rely on it. What it does when you hit it is stop tracking feedback from new users, and their automated conversation analysis stops too until you raise it.
So the cap protects the invoice by switching off the part of the product that collects feedback from people who have not been counted yet.
Somebody new arrives with an idea and nothing records it. That is a coherent way to build it, though it is rarely what people picture when they set a budget ceiling.
Does their AI raise the number you pay for?
Yes, and they say so themselves rather than hiding it.
Autopilot is their AI layer and their pricing page puts it on every plan, free one included. What it does is read your support conversations, your sales calls and your customer reviews, find feedback in them, and file it for you.
It is a genuinely useful idea and it is the headline of their pricing page.
Now read it next to the meter. Their own answer to what Autopilot is ends with this.
Users with feedback found by Autopilot count towards your tracked user count.
So the feature that costs nothing is the feature that raises the quantity you are billed on. A customer who never visited your board, never voted and never commented becomes a tracked user because the AI found them complaining in a Zendesk ticket. That is not a trick.
It follows directly from their definition, where a tracked user is anybody with feedback attributed to them, and Autopilot's whole job is attributing feedback to people.
What it means practically is that your tracked user count no longer depends only on how many people you invited to the board. It depends on how much your support desk says, which is a number you do not control and did not previously think of as a billing input.
VoteFirst has no equivalent, and not for lack of time. It has no AI features at all, by decision. A vote gets counted because a person cast it. That is a smaller product and on this particular page it is also the reason the second column of the table above never moves.
How many of your own team can use it?
Fewer than the tracked user ladder suggests, and this is the limit most comparisons miss.
Their table gives a separate manager count. Free carries five managers, Pro carries ten, and Business is custom. Contributors are unlimited on all three, so the people who only read and comment are not the constraint. Managers are.
So two ceilings apply at once. The tracked user ladder decides your monthly rate, and the manager count decides how many colleagues can actually run the thing. A team of fifteen product and support people on Pro has run out of managers long before it has run out of plan.
On live sites the teams are small. Paying Canny workspaces list a median of 5 members, a quarter list 3 or fewer and a quarter 17 or more, and 101 of the 300 list more than ten. Free ones list a median of 2. The record counts members without saying which of them are managers.
VoteFirst has no manager tier and no per seat charge. What it has instead is a plan boundary, and it goes against VoteFirst at the bottom.
The nine dollar plan has no team members at all, so if you need a second colleague administering the board you are on the thirty nine dollar plan. Their ten managers on Pro is more seats than VoteFirst's thirty nine dollars gives you.
If this arithmetic is what pushed you to look elsewhere, what actually moves when you leave is here, including the part that does not.
Why does the number only ever grow?
Because nothing in the definition resets.
A tracked user is somebody with an attributed post, vote or comment. Once that has happened it has happened. An account that went quiet two years ago is still a person with a vote attributed to them.
That is the fact that makes this calculator worth building. Your tracked user count is not your customer count and it does not track your customer count. It tracks the total number of people who have ever participated, which only goes one way, and your bill follows it.
If your board works, this is the shape of your invoice. That is not a criticism of metered pricing, which aligns what you pay with how much the product is doing. It is just worth seeing on one screen before you choose.
What plan are live Canny sites on?
About one in three pays. Of 923 live Canny sites read on 3 October 2026, 300 (32.5%) run on an active paid subscription and 523 (56.7%) on the free plan.
| Billing state in the site's record | Sites | Carry noindex | Median members |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid and active | 300 | 0 | 5 |
| Free | 523 | 523 | 2 |
| Cancelled, expired, cancelling, overdue or on a trial | 100 | 100 | 3 |
The last row is 60 cancelled, 20 expired, 8 set to cancel, 6 overdue on payment and 6 on a trial.
Older sites pay more often: 113 of the 180 created before 2021 (63%), against 187 of the 743 created since (25%). An old site still answering today is one that stayed, so the gap measures survival as much as conversion.
Does a free Canny board show up on Google?
Not while the workspace is on the free plan. Canny's board code writes a noindex, nofollow robots tag whenever the workspace is on the free plan or its subscription is not active, and leaves it out for an active paid one. The live sites matched the code on every count: all 523 free sites and all 100 in the last row above carried the tag, including the 6 on a trial and the 8 still paid up but set to cancel, and none of the 300 paying sites did.
The board's own setting does not change that. On sites that do not pay, 873 of 993 public boards had their search indexing switch on and still carried the tag. On paying sites the switch decides, and 207 of 868 boards had it off by choice. The settings on every board read are in a separate file.
A free board still opens from a link. Search engines are asked to leave it out, so a customer searching for a request on it will not find the board that way.
VoteFirst has no free plan, and its public boards carry no noindex on either paid plan. The same reading across seventeen tools, with the file to download, shows which others do the same.
What does VoteFirst cost at the same numbers?
Nine dollars a month, at every number in the table above.
That is LITE, which is one project, one roadmap and weighted voting included, with no API, no custom domain and no team members. Thirty nine dollars a month on PRO adds those.
There is no per voter meter and no per seat multiplier anywhere in the product, so a board with fifty voters and a board with fifty thousand cost the same. Against Canny's staircase, VoteFirst's is the same line at any size.
VoteFirst has no free tier. If your board will stay under about twenty five participants, Canny's free plan is genuinely cheaper and the calculator says so at those numbers.
Which should you actually buy?
If your feedback has to sit behind a login, buy Canny. Their private boards are on every plan including the free one, and VoteFirst has nothing like them.
If you have many small products and few voters, their free tier is more generous than anything VoteFirst offers.
If you expect a lot of participation, look at every tool that does not meter voters rather than only at VoteFirst, because most of the category does not meter them either.
If your voters pay you very different amounts and you need to tell the loudest group from the largest account, that is what VoteFirst does, and the fuller comparison is here.
Your board comes with you
Paste your Canny board's address into Settings and posts, statuses and vote counts come across. Comments stay behind. Read your board first to see what it holds and what Canny charges at that size, no account needed.
14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.