Why per-user pricing punishes you for succeeding
A feedback board has one job: get more of your users to tell you what they want. Any price that rises with the number of people who do that is charging you for the tool working. That is the whole argument, and the rest of this post is the detail. Petĩra charges a flat rate per workspace, with unlimited ideas, votes and voters on every plan including the free one. You pay for what you set up, never for how many people show up.
The four ways feedback tools charge
Most feedback and feature-request tools fall into one of four pricing models. The names below are the vendors' own labels, as published on their pricing pages in September 2026. Check those pages for current numbers; the models themselves change far less often than the prices.
| Model | How the bill moves | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Per tracked user | Up in bands as more of your users post, vote or are identified | Canny |
| Per team seat, plus usage | Up with each person on your side who needs access, plus per-use charges for AI features | Featurebase |
| Metered credits and views | Up with seats, AI credits and page views | Sleekplan |
| Flat rate per workspace | Changes only when you choose a bigger plan | UserJot, Nolt, Frill, Petĩra |
| Self-hosted, open source | Your server bill and your time | Fider |
Three of the five charge you for growth of one kind or another. The two that don't are a flat fee and running it yourself.
What "per tracked user" means in practice
A tracked user is, roughly, anyone the tool has seen: someone who posted an idea, voted on one, or was identified to the board by your app. The free tier covers a small number of them. Above that, the bill steps up each time your audience crosses into the next band.
Picture a small SaaS with two hundred active users at launch. The founder embeds a feedback widget, announces it, and the users do exactly what was hoped: they post, they vote, they come back. By the end of the year the product has two thousand active users and a lively board. Under a tracked-user model that board has moved through several price bands on the way. Nothing about the founder's needs changed. One board, one admin, the same widget. The audience grew, and the audience is the meter.
Now the uncomfortable part. Teams respond to meters. When each identified user costs money, you stop identifying users. You keep the widget off the main app and link to a portal instead. You think twice before announcing the board to your whole list. You prune. Every one of those reactions makes the board less useful, which is the opposite of the reason you bought it.
What "per seat" means in practice
Per-seat pricing meters the other side: the people on your team who look at the feedback. It is the standard model for tools where each user generates work, like a support inbox, and it is fair there.
For a feedback board it has the same shape of problem, smaller. The best thing that can happen to a board internally is that the whole company reads it. Support sees what customers keep asking for, engineers see the votes behind a ticket, the founder sees the pattern. A per-seat price turns "let everyone read it" into a budget line, so the board ends up with two logins and a weekly screenshot in Slack.
What a flat rate changes
Petĩra charges per workspace, in three sizes, and the price is the same whether ten people or ten thousand use the board.
| Plan | Price | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | One board, one seat for you. Unlimited ideas, votes and voters. |
| Pro | €19 a month, €190 a year | Ten boards, unlimited seats for your team, private boards, signed identity, webhooks, no Petĩra branding. |
| Team | €49 a month, €490 a year | Unlimited boards, Slack, Discord and GitHub Issues, the audit log. |
Prices are before VAT and verified October 2026 against our own pricing page, which is the only pricing page we will quote numbers from.
The things that move you between plans are things you decide: how many boards you run, whether a board is private, whether you want the board wired into Slack or GitHub, how many of your own people need to sign in. None of them is a number your users control.
This is not generosity, it is the only pricing that does not fight the product. The widget is meant to sit inside your app and identify every user with a signed handoff, so voting is one click and nobody creates an account. We can offer that to everyone on a paid plan precisely because the identified user is not the meter. If it were, we would be in the strange position of selling a feature that raises your bill every time it works.
What we do meter, and why
Flat rate does not mean everything is free. It means the meter is capability rather than volume. The honest version of our list:
- Boards. One on Free, ten on Pro, unlimited on Team. A board is a decision you make, not a thing your users do.
- Seats for your team. The Free plan has one seat, yours. Paid plans have unlimited seats, because once you are paying we want the whole company reading the board, not two people and a screenshot.
- Private boards, custom branding, integrations, the audit log. These are the features a product with a real team around it needs, and they are what the paid plans are for.
What is never metered: ideas, votes, comments, voters, identified users, email notifications to voters, page views. If any of those ever showed up on an invoice from us, the pricing had failed.
When per-user pricing is the right buy
Fairness demands the other side. A tracked-user model funds a much larger product than ours. If your team needs call transcription, revenue attribution against a CRM, or a sales-led rollout across several business units, the vendors who charge that way have built those things and a flat-rate board has not. Pay for the product you need.
The point of this post is narrower: for a small team whose feedback board is a board, the meter should not be the audience. The moment your users show up in numbers is the moment the tool has done its job, and the bill should not be the thing that notices first.
The one sentence
If you remember one thing from our pricing page, it is the sentence near the top: we never charge you more because more of your users participate. Everything above is the reasoning behind it.
Petĩra is a feedback board, roadmap and changelog for small SaaS teams, with an embeddable widget. The free plan is free for as long as you like. If you want to see what a flat-rate board looks like with real traffic on it, ours is public.