The feedback tool that lets your customers build the roadmap

Most software companies collect customer feedback the way people keep receipts - in a drawer, unsorted, consulted only when something goes wrong. A note in Slack here, a support email there, a feature request buried in a spreadsheet nobody has opened since the last quarter. Frill's whole premise is that this drawer is where good products go to stall.

Frill is a customer feedback platform. It gives product teams one place to collect ideas, let users vote on them, arrange the winners on a public roadmap, and then announce when they ship. Founded in 2019 by Mike Hill and Thomas Garrood, the company is bootstrapped, runs with a team of around six, and has taken no outside funding. It is the kind of small, deliberate software business that rarely makes headlines and quietly shows up on a lot of product teams' invoices.

The pitch on its homepage is unfussy: "the all-in-one customer feedback tool for product teams." The word doing the work there is all-in-one. Frill's argument is that most teams were paying for three tools where one would do.

The ProblemThree tabs, one job

Walk into a typical SaaS company and you will often find a feedback board in one tab, a roadmap tool in another, and a changelog stapled on somewhere with a third subscription. Each one holds a slice of the same conversation, and none of them talk to each other. A customer asks for a feature in the board. Someone maybe adds it to the roadmap. Months later it ships, and the person who requested it never hears a word.

Frill collapses that into a single loop. An idea comes in, gathers votes, moves onto the roadmap by status - Future, In Development, Shipped - and then becomes an announcement that notifies the people who asked for it. The person who requested the feature gets pinged when it lands. That closing of the loop is the part that is easy to describe and surprisingly rare to find bundled.

There is a quiet discipline in this. Frill sells a feedback tool, and by most accounts it uses one heavily on itself - its founders are cited in reviews for answering support quickly and acting on requests fast. A feedback company that ignores feedback would be a bad look, and they seem to know it.

The MoneyA fraction of the going rate

The clearest way to understand Frill is to look at what it costs next to the alternatives. This is the argument the product makes in numbers. Canny, the best-known name in the category, is priced for funded startups and can run into the hundreds of dollars a month. Frill starts around $25 a month for its Startup plan and about $49 for the Business plan with unlimited ideas. There is a 14-day free trial and no credit card is required to begin.

Entry price, per month (approx.)

Frill

$25

Nolt

$25

Frill Biz

$49

Canny

$400

That gap is the entire business strategy. On AppSumo, where Frill once ran a lifetime deal, reviewers were blunt about why they switched: "Products like Productboard, UserVoice and Canny are absurdly expensive for small businesses," one wrote, calling Frill "a perfect alternative." The company is not trying to out-feature the incumbents. It is trying to be the sensible default for everyone the incumbents priced out.

The ProductFour parts, one widget

Frill is built from four connected pieces. Ideas is the voting board where customers post requests, upvote each other, and argue it out in the comments. Roadmap is the public view that shows what is coming, sorted by status. Announcements is the changelog - release notes with rich text and images, which users can subscribe to. And Widget is the piece that ties it together: an embeddable panel that drops all of the above directly inside your own product, so a customer never has to leave your app to tell you what they want.

That last one is the sharpest idea. Feedback tools live and die on whether anyone actually uses them, and the surest way to kill participation is to send people somewhere else. By putting the feedback loop inside the product, Frill removes the trip. There are also in-app surveys - NPS, CSAT, Quick Polls, and product-market-fit surveys - for teams that want a number to go with the anecdotes.

The BuildersA two-founder, two-hemisphere company

Frill's co-founders work an ocean and most of a planet apart. Mike Hill is based in Sydney; Thomas Garrood, the co-founder and CTO, works out of Laguna Beach, California. Hill is a serial bootstrapper who has built a small portfolio of self-funded SaaS products - among them Curator.io, Juuno, Flook, and Anycamp - with a content-first, no-investor playbook. Frill fits that pattern: launch lean, listen hard, keep shipping, and let the product compound rather than a funding round.

The result is a company with the temperament of its own product. Small, responsive, unglamorous, and focused on doing one job well rather than sprawling into ten. In a category full of platforms racing to add AI summaries and analytics dashboards, Frill's restraint is itself a position.

The MarketWhere it fits

The customer feedback market splits roughly by budget and ambition. Productboard and UserVoice sit at the enterprise end, built for companies with dedicated product operations and procurement teams. Canny is the popular mid-market choice for funded startups. Nolt is the ultra-lightweight option for teams that want almost nothing but a voting board. Frill lands in the middle-affordable band: more capable and connected than the bare-bones tools, far cheaper and simpler than the enterprise suites.

Its natural customers follow from that - small SaaS businesses, digital agencies managing feedback for clients, and solo founders who want a real roadmap without a real invoice. For them, Frill's bundle is not a compromise. It is precisely the shape of the job.

None of this is a story about disruption. It is a story about a small team that noticed a lot of people were overpaying for three tools, built one that did the important parts, priced it for the people who were being ignored, and then kept the thing well-maintained. In software, that is often enough.