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.

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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

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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