Ideabug
Feedback, minus the SaaS tax
Drop one script tag into your app. Your users get a bell, a changelog, a bug report form, and a public roadmap. You get all the data — on your server, on your terms.
Why Ideabug?
Product feedback tools are either expensive SaaS with per-seat pricing, or they force your users off-site to a public board. Ideabug is neither: it's a widget on your domain, a database you own, and code you can read.
The SaaS way
- • $50–$200/month per seat, forever
- • Your feedback data lives on someone else's server
- • Users redirected to a third-party subdomain to vote
- • Sign-up walls before anyone can submit
- • Branding and theming locked behind "Enterprise"
The Ideabug way
- ✓ Self-host once, run forever. MIT licensed.
- ✓ Your DB, your backups, your compliance story
- ✓ Widget lives inside your app — users never leave
- ✓ Anonymous by default, JWT upgrade when they log in
- ✓ Standalone public roadmap page included
One widget. Four jobs.
Announcements, bug reports, feature requests with voting, and a public roadmap — all from a single drop-in script.
Product Feedback Features
Everything you need to close the loop between your product and your users
In-app Announcements
Publish product updates, ship changelogs, broadcast breaking changes. Per-user read tracking, per-user mute, and a bell badge that just works.
One-click Bug Reports
Users submit bugs from inside your app. Ideabug auto-attaches the current URL, viewport size, and user agent so you're not debugging blind.
Feature Requests + Voting
Users suggest what they want. Other users vote. You prioritize based on actual demand instead of whoever emailed you last.
Public Roadmap
Now / Next / Shipped columns, available inside the widget and as a standalone shareable page. Transparency without the overhead of maintaining a Notion doc.
Audience Segmentation
Pass segments (plan, region, role) in a signed JWT and target announcements to specific cohorts. Tell Pro users about Pro features, EU users about EU changes.
Anonymous-first Identity
Users interact without signing up. When they later log into your app, their anonymous votes and read-state are atomically merged into their identified profile via JWT.
What it looks like
The user-facing widget lives in your app. The admin panel lives on your server.
Expanded widget
What your users see
Announcement detail
Rich changelog entries
Public Roadmap
Now / Next / Shipped — shareable standalone page
Announcements admin
Draft, schedule, ship
Tickets inbox
Bugs + feature requests, triaged
Contacts
Anonymous + identified users
Segments
Target announcements to cohorts
Add it in one script tag
Two lines of HTML get you the default bell. Go deeper when you're ready.
Drop the widget into your app
Put a target div where you want the bell (usually your top nav), and load the script from your Ideabug host.
<div id="ideabug-feedback"></div>
<script
src="https://YOUR-IDEABUG-HOST/script.js"
data-ideabug-host="https://YOUR-IDEABUG-HOST"
data-ideabug-target="#ideabug-feedback"
defer
></script>
Self-host the server
Standard Rails app — clone, set credentials, migrate, boot.
git clone https://github.com/humadroid-io/ideabug.git
cd ideabug
bundle install
bin/rails db:setup
bin/rails server
Identify users via JWT (optional)
When a user logs into your app, sign an RS256 JWT in your backend and return it to the widget. Anonymous reads + votes are merged into the identified contact atomically.
window.IdeabugWidget.configure({
jwt: async () => fetch('/api/ideabug-token')
.then(r => r.text())
});
That's it. Your users have a feedback channel; you have the data.
View Full DocumentationExplore our other open source projects
All MIT licensed. All battle-tested in Humadroid production. All free.
Free & Open Source
Ideabug is MIT licensed. Self-host it, fork it, rebrand it. No per-seat pricing, no feature gating, no dashboard-usage caps.
One of several open source projects from the team at Humadroid.
Running Ideabug in production? We'd love to hear about it. Share your story on GitHub or reach out to us.