A requests board on your own server
Scope Request is a feature-request board, a public roadmap and a changelog. You buy a licence, install it on hosting you already pay for, and the ideas, the email addresses and the complaints stay in your own database.
Free licence at £0 for one board and 50 ideas. £199 a year for everything a single product needs, £499 for hosts and agencies running boards for their clients.
Three screens that close the loop
Someone asks for something, other people say they want it too, you decide, and everyone who asked finds out when it ships. All three parts are one install and one database, so the changelog entry you publish is what sets the posts to released and tells the voters.
The board
People post an idea, choose a category and vote. As the title is typed, the closest existing posts appear with a vote button beside them, so most duplicates are never posted at all.
One vote per person per post, verified email only. Staff can add a vote on behalf of a customer and record where it came from.
The roadmap
Planned, In progress and Recently released, built from the statuses you already use rather than from a second list you have to keep. Filter by category, or mark an item as internal so it never appears.
A timeline view by target quarter, and a roadmap for a single category that can be embedded on a page of your own.
The changelog
Entries with New, Improved and Fixed labels and a public URL each. Link an entry to the posts it closes and every voter, commenter and subscriber is told in one email.
Subscribe by email with double opt-in, an RSS feed per product, and entries that can be written now and published on release day.
Three reasons this shape of product exists
A feedback board is cheap to run and expensive to buy, because of what the hosted tools choose to count. Scope Request is not cheaper on features. It is a different bill, in a different place, with a different set of people answering for the data.
The bill stops growing when the board starts working
Every hosted tool meters the thing you want more of. Count tracked users and every person who votes is on the invoice. Count seats and your support team is. Count projects and a second product is a second subscription. A board that succeeds is a board that costs more.
Scope Request is one licence for the install. The thousandth voter costs what the first one did, and the second product on a £499 licence costs nothing at all.
No processor, so no annual agreement to read
What a feedback board holds is your customers' email addresses and their written complaints about your product. Send that to a hosted tool and you are the controller, they are the processor, and once a year somebody has to read the agreement and work out where the sub-processors sit.
Here there is nobody to agree with. We never hold a member record. Once a day the install posts four fields to the licence server: the key, the hostname, the install path and the version number. If the licence server cannot be reached, the board carries on regardless.
If you already run servers, installing it is the easy part
This was built for people who already run a control panel, their own billing and their own mail. For them another supplier, another login and another invoice is the awkward option, and a document root plus a licence key is the familiar one.
Ordinary shared hosting is enough. PHP 8.3 or later, MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.6, a document root pointed
at public/, and one cron line a minute. There is no Redis, no Node, no queue daemon and no
search cluster to keep alive.
Measured on 2 October 2026, from each vendor's own pricing page
These are not bad products. All three are better staffed than we are and have integrations we do not have. They are here for the shape of the bill, which is the one thing a self-hosted licence can change, and the figures are quoted as each vendor publishes them rather than converted or rounded.
| Product | Free tier | What it counts | Published paid tiers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canny | Yes, 25 tracked users | Tracked users, which is anyone associated with feedback | Pro $79/month billed yearly at 100+ tracked users; Business is custom priced from 5,000+ |
| Featurebase | Yes, 1 seat | Seats, plus $0.49 per AI resolution | Growth $29, Professional $59, Enterprise $99, each per seat per month billed yearly |
| Upvoty | No | Projects | Power $15 and Super $25 per month, one project each; Hyper $49 for unlimited projects |
| Scope Request | Yes, one board and 50 ideas | Nothing. The licence is per install, per year | £199 a year, or £499 a year for unlimited products on one install |
Where they beat us. They have Intercom, Zendesk, Jira and Linear integrations, support teams, and years of polish on the AI features. If a long list of integrations is what you are shopping for, buy one of them. What they cannot sell is a board whose database is on your own server and whose price does not move when ten thousand people vote.
What the table is not. List prices read on one day, in dollars, before any annual discount or anything negotiated. Convert them and compare them against your own numbers rather than ours. The useful column is the third one, which is the unit each vendor has chosen to count, because that is the one that decides what you pay in three years.
Strangers can write to a feedback board
Which is why most of the tools put the controls behind a higher tier. Here nothing a member writes is visible to anyone else until a person or a trust rule releases it, and that holds on the free licence as much as on the £499 one.
- Hold everything, hold new people only, or hold nothing. Set per board, and set separately for posts and for comments, so a board can be open while its comments stay held.
- Reject with a reason. Duplicate, already possible, out of scope, a support issue or spam, plus free text. The author is told privately and nothing is published.
- Merge duplicates. Votes, subscribers and comments move to the main post and the vote sets combine as a union, so somebody who voted on both is counted once.
- Move it to support. A post that is really a fault goes to your support desk and off the board, instead of sitting there collecting votes for a bug.
- Blocked words, email domains and link domains. A match holds the item rather than rejecting it, so a false positive costs a moderator ten seconds and costs the author nothing.
- Links from untrusted people render as plain text. Trust is earned per product after a few approved posts, and a licence holder of yours can start trusted.
- Ban, suspend or shadow-ban a person or a whole email domain, on one product's boards or on all of them. A shadow-banned account still sees its own posts.
- An audit log. Every approve, reject, merge, edit, ban and status change is recorded with who did it and when.
- Rate limits and a captcha. Daily limits per person, request limits per IP, and a challenge on signing in, posting and commenting from Turnstile, hCaptcha or reCAPTCHA, whichever you already use.
- Title rules applied without a moderator. Length, no shouting, one exclamation mark at most, and no reposting your own idea from last week.
Sort the list by the customers behind it
Connect your own application with a signed hand-off and the board can show staff who is actually voting. A hosted tool has no way to see your billing system. This reads it through a connector you write about twenty lines of code for.
Customer context beside the vote
Company, plan, MRR and how long they have been a customer, fetched from your own app through the connector and cached for an hour. Staff see it; the public never does.
A prioritisation view
Sort by votes, by weighted votes, by the MRR behind a post, by the number of paying voters, by trend or by effort, with an optional RICE score. Weighting never changes the public count.
One sign-in, no second password
Your app signs a token that lasts sixty seconds and is good once. The board verifies it, finds or creates the member, links them to your customer id and signs them in.
Ordinary hosting, and nothing clever
If you can run WordPress on it you can almost certainly run this, with one caveat worth checking first:
an account that has only ever run WordPress often has no PDO extension enabled at all, because WordPress
uses mysqli. Turn pdo and nd_pdo_mysql on for the PHP version the account has
selected.
- PHP
- 8.3 or later, with pdo_mysql, mbstring, intl, sodium, bcmath, gd, dom, fileinfo, curl and openssl.
- Database
- MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.6 and later. Search uses the database's own full-text index, so there is no separate search service to run.
- Web server
- Anything that can point a document root at
public/, with the rest of the tree outside it. - Cron
- One line, every minute. It sends the mail, delivers the webhooks and runs everything else on a schedule.
- Any SMTP or API mail service, configured on a screen. Safe mode is on until you turn it off, so a copy of a live install cannot email your customers.
- Languages
- British English and Spanish ship as translation files. Every interface string is in both, and licensees can add their own.
Start on the free licence
One product, one board, fifty ideas and every moderation feature. It is a demonstration rather than a destination, and it is the honest way to find out whether your customers will use a board at all before you pay for one.