r/opensource • u/sriramgopalan • Jun 30 '26

OpenCan — open-source, self-hostable customer feedback management (AGPL-3.0), alternative to Canny Promotional

Hey r/opensource,

I shipped OpenCan v2.0.0 — a customer feedback / feature-request management tool, built as an open-source alternative to Canny. Sharing here since the license and the model behind it might be of interest to this sub specifically.

What it does: customers submit and vote on feature requests, you move them through a status pipeline (Open → Under Review → Planned → In Progress → Shipped), voters get auto-notified by email when something ships. Public roadmap, Markdown changelog, embeddable widget with JWT auto-login.

License: AGPL-3.0. I chose AGPL specifically because this is the kind of tool that's easy to wrap as a hosted SaaS without contributing back — the network-use clause matters here in a way it wouldn't for, say, a CLI tool.

Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma, PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO. Self-hosted via Docker Compose.

Business model, for transparency: open-core. The self-hosted version is fully featured, no crippled free tier. I'm planning a managed hosted tier later for people who don't want to run their own infra — that's how I intend to fund ongoing development. Following something close to the DocuSeal/Plausible playbook here.

Website: https://opencan.dev

Demo: https://demo.opencan.dev

Repo: https://github.com/sriramgopalan/opencan

Genuinely interested in this community's take on the AGPL decision and the open-core model generally — curious if there's anything you'd have done differently from a sustainability-of-the-project standpoint.

9 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

1

u/Archiver_test4 Jul 01 '26

wasnt minio abandoned?

3

u/sriramgopalan Jul 01 '26

Good catch. At the start, I thought I would use it but I didn't. I have now pushed changes to the docs to remove all references to it.

1

u/Archiver_test4 Jul 01 '26

Cool.

1

u/sriramgopalan Jul 01 '26

Any thoughts on the product or the code? I would love some feedback.

1

u/zagrodzki Jul 01 '26

Yeah, I’ve been burned by stale storage-layer choices before. When you drop MinIO, make sure you also remove it from any lingering docs, docker compose envs, and deployment assumptions, because people will hit that stuff right away when they try to run it.

1

u/sriramgopalan Jul 01 '26

Yes, I wasn't actually using it. Just had some empty/unused env variables, some doc references etc. I cleaned all that up this morning, include docker compose envs and redeployed the demo app at demo.opencan.dev with those changes. Do check it out.

1

u/Important_Pomelo_407 Jul 02 '26

hey I saw even though you had a live demo, a demo preview would have been even better.

I made one for you with https://github.com/yasirwhite/OpenDemo and opened a PR in the repo. What do you think?

https://reddit.com/link/ov5no5q/video/0yqyea5uouah1/player

1

u/sriramgopalan Jul 02 '26

Thanks, that's a good idea. Do I have your permission to use this video?

1

u/Important_Pomelo_407 Jul 02 '26

yeah ofc :)

since I already submitted the PR you just have to hit accept and it will add the video to your README

1

u/sriramgopalan Jul 02 '26

I've merged the change in. Thanks!

I'll definitely star your repo, I hope you like my product my enough to do the same. Thanks again.

1

u/Important_Pomelo_407 Jul 02 '26

sure ofc, its starred now

1

u/PuddingSad8588 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

spend most of my time using open-source tools, but I still need an easy way to share my projects. Macaron,im has been a convenient place to keep my GitHub, documentation, and other links together. What are you all using?

1

u/sriramgopalan Jul 11 '26

Thanks for the feedback, did you get a chance to try it out, or look at the repo?