
Shipnotes — Self-Hosted Changelog + Roadmap + Feature Voting
Self-hosted changelog + roadmap. Pay once, ditch Canny.
Shipnotes is the self-hosted Canny alternative: a public changelog, a public roadmap board, and a feature-request voting board with comments — all in one Node app backed by one SQLite file. Canny charges $79/month ($948/yr) per workspace for this; Shipnotes is $49 once and pays for itself in 19 days.
Public changelog: Markdown posts tagged New/Improved/Fixed, published with one click, valid RSS 2.0 feed
Roadmap board: Planned / In Progress / Shipped columns sorted by votes
Feature requests: visitors submit and upvote with no account (one vote per visitor), comment threads included
Moderation: approve, merge duplicates (votes carry over, deduped), or decline with a public reason
Email subscribers via your own SMTP — publishing a post emails everyone with one-click unsubscribe
Embeddable "What's new" widget: one script tag adds a bell with an unread badge and latest-posts dropdown to any site
Dark, fast, keyboard-friendly admin dashboard
One SQLite file — trivial backups, zero telemetry
Runs as a Windows desktop app or on a $5 VPS (Docker included).
What's included:
Windows installer download (build via
npm run dist)Full source access — https://github.com/bensblueprints/changelog-roadmap (MIT)
Lifetime v1 updates
Setup guide (README quick start)
Premium tiers coming later
