Fider

Fider is an open-source customer feedback platform that gives product teams a structured, public portal for collecting feature requests, allowing users to upvote the ideas they care about most, and tracking progress through clear status updates. It replaces the chaos of scattered feedback across email threads, Slack messages, and spreadsheets with a single community-driven board where customer voices shape the roadmap.

Built with Go and PostgreSQL, Fider is designed for both self-hosting and managed cloud deployment. The self-hosted path requires only Docker and a PostgreSQL instance, making it accessible to small teams without significant infrastructure overhead. Fider Cloud, the managed offering, handles updates, patches, and infrastructure entirely so teams can focus on their product.

Since its v0.33.0 release, Fider has adopted an open-core model. The core feedback portal — public boards, upvoting, status tracking, tagging, REST API, webhooks, and OAuth — remains fully open-source under AGPL-3.0. Certain advanced capabilities such as content moderation and search indexing are gated as Pro features, accessible via a commercial license through Stripe or Paddle billing integration built directly into the admin panel.

Fider has a strong track record of active development with over 1,800 commits, 40 releases since 2017, and consistent monthly commit cadence. The project is genuinely community-driven, with 60+ contributors and a public Fider board where its own roadmap is managed.

What You Get

• Public Feedback Board - A branded, shareable web portal where customers submit feature requests, comment on ideas, and upvote to signal demand so product teams see what actually matters.
• Upvoting and Voting System - Each user gets a limited number of votes to allocate across ideas, creating a ranked priority signal that reflects genuine community preference rather than vocal minority noise.
• Post Status Tracking - Ideas progress through statuses like Planned, In Progress, Completed, and Won’t Do with optional public response fields so submitters always know what happened to their suggestion.
• Tag and Filter System - Admins can create custom tags and apply them to posts for filtering by theme, team, or release cycle, making it easy to find all feedback relevant to a specific area.
• REST API and Webhooks - A documented REST API and configurable webhooks let you pipe new posts and votes into Jira, Linear, Notion, Slack, or any internal tool your team already uses.
• OAuth and Social Login - Built-in OAuth support for Google, Facebook, GitHub, and custom OAuth2 providers so users sign in without creating yet another account.
• Admin Moderation Controls - Admins can merge duplicate posts, pin popular ideas, assign tags, manage users, and with Pro enabled, approve or reject content before it goes public.
• Multi-tenant Architecture - Each Fider installation is isolated per tenant with its own subdomain, branding, settings, and user base, making it suitable for agencies managing multiple products.

Common Use Cases

• SaaS product roadmap management - A SaaS company replaces a messy Trello board and email inbox with a Fider portal so customers vote on features, the team responds with status updates, and everyone can see what is being worked on.
• Open-source project prioritization - An open-source maintainer hosts Fider alongside their project so the community votes on which issues to tackle next, reducing maintainer guesswork and improving contributor focus.
• Internal enterprise ideation - An enterprise team runs a private Fider instance for internal feature requests, allowing employees to submit and vote on product improvements with SSO via a custom OAuth2 provider.
• Beta program feedback collection - A startup launches a private Fider board during closed beta to identify which missing features are blocking adoption before committing engineering resources.
• Customer success consolidation - A customer success team uses Fider to aggregate feedback reported via support tickets into a single ranked board that product managers review in sprint planning.
• Agency multi-product feedback hubs - A digital agency self-hosts Fider to manage feedback portals for multiple client products from a single installation, each with its own subdomain and branding.

Under The Hood

Architecture Fider follows a clean layered architecture where HTTP handlers delegate to a message bus that dispatches typed commands and queries to registered service handlers. This bus pattern — inspired by CQRS — decouples the web layer from business logic and makes it trivial to swap or extend service implementations by registering new handlers. The open-core model is implemented at this abstraction layer: Pro features are registered as additional bus handlers loaded via Go’s import side-effects, so commercial capabilities inject cleanly into the core without any conditional branching in the open-source code. Multi-tenancy is achieved through request-scoped context injection where every handler receives a resolved Tenant object, eliminating the need for database sharding or separate deployments per customer.

Tech Stack The backend is Go 1.25 serving HTTP via httprouter, with PostgreSQL as the sole database accessed through a thin dbx abstraction layer and managed by numbered SQL migrations. Email delivery is pluggable across SMTP, Mailgun, and AWS SES via the same bus handler registration pattern used everywhere else. The frontend is React 18 with TypeScript, Tiptap for rich-text editing, Lingui for i18n with an automated translation workflow via GitHub Actions, and Webpack 5 for bundling with server-side rendering handled through a separate esbuild pipeline. Blob storage supports local filesystem, S3-compatible services, and SQL-backed storage, selected at startup via environment configuration. End-to-end tests use Playwright and Cucumber with a dedicated test world that spins up real browser sessions against a running server.

Code Quality Fider has extensive test coverage across all layers: Go unit tests with a mocking bus that lets handlers be tested in isolation, React component tests with Testing Library and realistic context mocks, and Cucumber-driven end-to-end scenarios that exercise full user flows through Playwright. The codebase enforces strict typing in both Go and TypeScript with golangci-lint and ESLint/Prettier running in CI. Error handling is explicit and typed throughout — Go errors are wrapped with context using a custom errors package and surface predictably through the HTTP layer. Input validation is bound at the handler boundary before any business logic executes. The bus handler counter system built into tests verifies that exactly the right operations are invoked under specific inputs.

What Makes It Unique Fider’s most technically distinctive choice is implementing its open-core commercial gating at the service bus level rather than through UI feature flags. Pro features are compiled-in Go packages that register additional bus handlers, meaning they cannot be bypassed by simply toggling a frontend flag — the handler simply does not exist in the open-source binary. The tenant-scoped context injection approach achieves true multi-tenancy without database sharding, a design that keeps the data model simple while supporting many isolated feedback portals. The automated locale translation pipeline using Google Cloud Translate integrated into CI keeps Fider genuinely internationalized across many languages with minimal maintainer effort.

Self-Hosting

Fider is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). This is a strong copyleft license: you can use, modify, and self-host Fider for free, including for commercial purposes, but if you distribute a modified version or run a modified version as a network service accessible to others, you must release your modifications under AGPL-3.0 as well. For most self-hosters running Fider internally for their own product’s feedback portal, this requirement is unlikely to apply. Organizations that want to build proprietary extensions on top of Fider or embed it in a commercial product without open-sourcing those modifications should contact the Fider team about a commercial arrangement.

Running Fider yourself requires a Linux server (or any platform supporting Docker), a PostgreSQL database, and optionally an S3-compatible storage bucket for file attachments. The Docker-based setup is straightforward and well-documented. You are responsible for database backups, PostgreSQL version upgrades, server maintenance, SSL termination, and applying Fider updates when new releases ship. Active development means updates arrive frequently — roughly monthly — so staying current requires a reliable update process. There is no built-in high-availability or clustering support; teams needing zero-downtime deployments will need to manage that at the infrastructure layer.

Fider Cloud, the managed offering from the Fider creators, removes all of the above operational burden. Cloud customers receive automatic updates, managed backups, and infrastructure reliability without lifting a finger. Since v0.33.0, the self-hosted open-source version also requires a Pro license key to unlock content moderation and search indexing features; these are the first commercially gated capabilities, and future Pro features may follow a similar pattern. Self-hosters who need these features must purchase a license, while Cloud subscribers receive them as part of their subscription. The project accepts donations and sponsors via OpenCollective for teams that want to support development without a commercial license.