Breaking
UPVOTY ships MCP server - feedback backlog now readable by Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor BOOTSTRAPPED Zero outside funding since 2018 ROADMAP Public boards report lower churn for customers PRICING Plans from $15/mo, 14-day trial, no card MERGE AI Auto-folds duplicate requests into one UPVOTY ships MCP server - feedback backlog now readable by Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor BOOTSTRAPPED Zero outside funding since 2018 ROADMAP Public boards report lower churn for customers PRICING Plans from $15/mo, 14-day trial, no card MERGE AI Auto-folds duplicate requests into one
Company Profile · Product Software

The feedback board that turns upvotes into a roadmap

Collect feedback with beautiful voting boards, ship features with a powerful roadmap, and let AI agents decide what to build next.

Every software company reaches the same moment. The product is working, users are showing up, and the feature requests start arriving faster than anyone can file them. They land in support tickets, in DMs, in a Slack channel someone muted three weeks ago, and in the founder's inbox at 11pm. Somewhere in that pile is the next thing worth building. Nobody can see it, because it isn't a list. It's noise.

Upvoty exists to turn that noise into a list. The Netherlands-based tool gives product teams three connected things: voting boards where users submit and upvote requests, a public roadmap that shows what is planned, in progress and shipped, and a changelog that tells voters when their request actually goes live. Collect, decide, ship, announce. It is a small loop, and Upvoty has spent seven years making it feel obvious.

01
Collect
Users post requests and vote on a board
02
Decide
Votes rank what matters most
03
Ship
Work moves across the public roadmap
04
Announce
Changelog notifies everyone who voted

THE ORIGINAn itch, then a product

Upvoty was not born from a whiteboard session about a market opportunity. Its founder, Mike Slaats, was running an earlier SaaS company when the customer feedback started to pile up faster than he could handle it. He went looking for a tool to manage it and could not find one that was both affordable and good. So in 2018 he built his own. He launched a beta that August, went public the following February, and hit roughly $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue within about three months.

Slaats was not a first-timer. He had started his first business as a teenager, run an SEO agency, and built a marketplace SaaS he later sold in a seven-figure exit. That exit funded Upvoty's early runway, which is part of why the company has a fact most of its category lacks: it never raised outside money. No seed round, no Series A, no board deck. Upvoty grew on its own revenue.

"You don't have to please everyone. Just start building a solution to a problem of a small audience you like to help."

THE CUSTOMERWho actually uses this

Upvoty's customers are mostly other software companies - the small and mid-sized SaaS teams who have enough users to generate real feedback but not enough headcount to hire someone whose whole job is triaging it. By 2021 the company reported more than 500 customers; by 2023, roughly 800, at an average of around $600 per customer per year. These are product managers, indie founders, and small teams who want a feedback system that runs itself.

2018
Founded
~800
Customers (2023)
$0
Outside funding
20+
Languages

The scale is worth being precise about. Upvoty is not a unicorn and does not pretend to be. Reported revenue was around $480,000 in 2023, up from roughly $264,000 the year before. In the founder's most active period, combined monthly income - product plus courses, community and podcast sponsorships - reached the $45,000 to $55,000 range. Those are the numbers of a healthy, focused, independent software business, which is exactly what it is.

THE PROBLEMWhy a list beats an inbox

The problem Upvoty solves is not really "collecting feedback." Feedback collects itself. The problem is that raw feedback lies to you. The loudest customer is not the most representative one. The request that shows up in your inbox five times might be the one that matters, or it might just be five copies of the same email thread. Without a way to count and rank, teams end up building for whoever complained most recently.

Voting fixes the counting. When users upvote a request instead of emailing it, the board does the ranking automatically. A feature with 200 votes is a different conversation than one with three. The roadmap fixes something else - the silence. A customer who submits a request and hears nothing assumes it vanished. A customer who can watch their request sit in a public "In Progress" column, with a follower count, has a reason to stay. Upvoty's customers have reported that public roadmaps helped reduce churn, and the logic is not mysterious: people rarely cancel a product they can see is being built for them.

Reported monthly recurring revenue - approximate, per founder interviews
~$1k
2019
~$17k
2020
~$20k
2021
~$45k+
2023
The climb of a founder who documented it out loud. Figures are approximate and drawn from public podcast and interview appearances - the shape matters more than the decimal.

THE PRODUCTThree things, tightly joined

Open Upvoty and you get boards you can make public or private, with upvoting, downvoting, leaderboards, tags, filters and moderation so nothing embarrassing goes live unreviewed. You can strip out all Upvoty branding, run the whole thing on your own custom domain, apply your own CSS, and offer it in more than 20 languages. Under the hood there is an API with webhooks, plus integrations that push updates into Slack, Intercom and Zapier so the feedback does not stay trapped in one tab.

Two newer pieces show where the product is heading. Merge AI automatically detects duplicate requests and folds them together, which is the kind of quiet feature that saves a product manager an hour a week and never gets a headline. And in 2026, Upvoty shipped an MCP server - a Model Context Protocol integration that lets AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity and Cursor read the feedback backlog directly. The tool built for humans to vote on what to build can now hand that same backlog to an AI agent. It is a neat inversion of its own premise.

The product's whole trick is that voting is counting, and counting is a decision nobody has to argue about.

THE COMPETITIONWhere it sits on the shelf

Upvoty lives in a crowded aisle. Canny, Frill, Nolt, Productboard, UserVoice and Featurebase all do versions of collect-vote-roadmap. The category is not short on options, which makes positioning the whole game. Upvoty's answer has been price and self-service: a plan starts around $15 a month, the pricing is on the page rather than behind a sales call, and the roadmap is public by default. Where the enterprise-leaning tools pull teams into demos and annual contracts, Upvoty aims at the founder who wants to sign up on a Tuesday and have a board live by Wednesday.

LayerWhat it doesWho it's for
Voting boardsRank requests by upvotes, not volume of complaintsTeams drowning in scattered feedback
Public roadmapShow planned / in progress / shipped in the openTeams fighting churn and silence
ChangelogNotify every voter when their request shipsTeams that want credit for shipping
MCP + Merge AIFeed the backlog to AI, auto-clean duplicatesTeams pointing assistants at their roadmap

THE MODELHow the business runs

The business model is unfashionably simple: monthly and annual subscriptions across a few tiers, from a $15 Power plan up through Super and Hyper, with a custom Enterprise option and a 14-day free trial that asks for no credit card. There is no free-forever tier acting as a funnel and no sales team acting as a gate. It is self-serve software sold at a self-serve price, which is only viable because the product is narrow enough to explain in one sentence and the company is lean enough to run on the resulting revenue.

That leanness is also the honest asterisk. Upvoty has moved through a full 2.0 rebuild that reviewers described as faster and more modern, and public review sites carry both praise for the new team's support and older complaints about slow responses during rougher stretches. It is a small operation. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in focus - a company doing one job and iterating on it in public for the better part of a decade.

"The product can be great and your team can be great, but if you're not passionate about your audience, it just won't work."

THE TAKEAWAYThe loop is the lesson

The most useful thing about Upvoty might be the idea it packages rather than the software itself. Ask what customers want. Let them rank it. Build in the open. Tell them when it lands. That loop works whether you pay $15 a month for a hosted version or wire it together yourself. Upvoty just makes the version you do not have to think about, for the many teams who would rather spend their thinking on the product they are actually shipping.

#user-feedback#feature-voting#product-roadmap#changelog#saas#bootstrapped#product-management#netherlands#canny-alternative#mcp