When you publish a release, VoteFirst emails every signed in voter whose own vote is in it, with the headings they voted for at the top. Readers who subscribed on your public changelog get the same email. Nobody else gets anything.
Somebody who posted or voted anonymously left no address, so they are not emailed. Somebody signed in with no email on their account is skipped the same way.
How it works
The entries come from the board you already keep
A release is a group of features that reached the Completed column. When you publish it, the cards in it become the entries, in the same words a voter read when they voted. There is no separate changelog editor to keep in sync with the roadmap, because there is no second copy of the text to drift from the first.
Publishing finds the votes and writes to the people who cast them
The moment you publish, the code collects the completed features in the release, finds the votes cast on those features, and keeps only the votes cast by a signed in user. It then writes one email per person, listing the release with every heading that person voted for first and marked.
Somebody who voted for two things in the same release gets one email naming both, not two separate messages. A release is claimed before anything is sent, so triggering the publish twice, or two people publishing at once, cannot announce the same release to the same voter twice.
Subscribers come next. Anybody can leave an address on the public changelog, and it joins the list only after its owner presses Confirm Subscription in the email VoteFirst sends. Each confirmed reader gets one email per release, sent in your board's name with a one click unsubscribe. An address that is both a voter and a subscriber gets one email, not two. Ideas you hid, and ideas on a private board, never appear in it.
Two limits sit on top of that. A voter can switch release emails off for themselves, and the switch is silent from your side, since nothing bounced and nothing looks wrong. And any one address takes at most one product email a day from VoteFirst across everything the account sends, so a voter who already heard from your board that morning does not also get the release email, and it is not tried again tomorrow.
None of this is a digest. The weekly or monthly owner report is a separate email, sent to you about your own board, and it never goes to a voter.
What the other feedback tools say about this on their own pages
Every tool in this category can, in principle, tell a voter when their request ships. Whether it says so, and whether it says it ships to the voter specifically rather than to a general subscriber list, is a different question, and the pages below answer it in their own words. Read on 2026-10-02.
| Tool | What its own page says |
|---|---|
| Canny | Its changelog page says anyone subscribed gets notified automatically when you publish, which is a subscriber list rather than a notice tied to one person's vote. |
| Upvoty | Its changelog page says plainly that when a requested feature ships, the people who cared about it hear about it, and that voters are told when something they requested goes live. |
| Frill | Its changelog page says every voter on an idea gets emailed automatically once that idea is linked to a published announcement. |
| Featurebase | Its changelog page and its help centre article on the changelog say nothing about notifying anyone when an entry is published. |
| Sleekplan | Its changelog page describes emailing subscribers and users about releases in general. It does not say the people notified are the ones who voted. |
| Fider | Its own marketing page makes no claim about emailing voters, and does not list a changelog feature at all. |
| Nolt | Could not read. nolt.io answered with an access error to this fetch on 2026-10-02. |
| Feature Upvote | Could not read. featureupvote.com answered with an access error to this fetch on 2026-10-02. |
What this does not do
It is not a marketing announcement tool. There is no scheduling, no audience segmentation and no campaign reporting.
It does not email anyone who only commented, only viewed the request, or voted without signing in. The address comes from a signed in account or from a reader who subscribed and confirmed. The replies a team sends by hand at every other stage are written out in full.
It does not send a digest to voters. The digest exists, and it has a floor of three pieces of activity before it sends at all, but it is addressed to the project's owner, never to a voter.
It does not let an owner pick who gets the release email. There is no segment to build: the voters and the confirmed subscribers are the list, and the Updates page shows every subscriber.
Where it runs inside your product
The changelog widget draws the same releases inside your own page with one script tag, and it works on the nine dollar plan along with every other widget, not only on the higher one.
A changelog on a marketing site is read by people who came looking. A changelog inside the product is read by people already using the thing that changed, which is usually the better placement for a release that mostly matters to existing users.
Questions people ask about this
Is there a feed instead of an email
No. Readers who did not vote follow releases by email instead. The public changelog has an email box, the reader confirms from the email VoteFirst sends, and every release after that arrives in their inbox. It needs no account and no vote.
Can a voter turn the email off
Yes, from their own side, and it does not tell you they did. The daily cap works the same way: a voter who already had one product email that day does not get a second one, and the release email is simply held rather than queued for tomorrow.
What does somebody with no account see
A public page of releases, newest first, each with its date and the features it contains, and beside each feature, how many people asked for it. Reading needs no account. Being emailed about a release needs a signed in vote or a confirmed subscription.
Each release also has its own address, built from its name, so a release called Autumn Cleanup lives at a readable link you can paste into a support reply and that keeps working after the next one ships. Views on that page are counted once per address every thirty minutes, which makes the number a floor rather than an exact count of readers.
Does the release email say what rivals charge me to send it
No. It costs nothing extra on any plan, because it is one of the things the changelog already does rather than a separate notification product billed on top.
Can I put it inside my own product
Yes, through the widget above, and the widget follows your board's own colours, fonts and corner radius rather than carrying a default look of its own.
14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.
Where to see a real one
VoteFirst's own changelog runs on the same feature.