It started with a spreadsheet nobody opened
A couple of years ago we shipped a small developer tool. Nothing huge — a CLI a few hundred people used and, to our surprise, actually liked. And once people like something, they tell you how to make it better. Ideas came in through Twitter DMs, a Discord channel, three different email threads, and a Google Sheet one of us kept promising to "clean up this weekend."
That weekend never came. The sheet grew to four hundred rows. Two people would ask for the same thing and we'd have no idea it was a duplicate. Someone would file a genuinely great idea and it would sink to row 217, never to be seen again. Worst of all, the people who took the time to write to us never heard back — not because we didn't care, but because we had no place to say "got it, we're doing this."
So we did the obvious thing: we went looking for a proper feedback tool.
The tools we tried all wanted to be a platform
We signed up for the popular ones. Every single one greeted us with an onboarding wizard, a "connect your data source" step, and a pricing page that charged per team member — as if collecting feedback got more expensive the moment a second person on our tiny team wanted to log in.
One of them made us book a demo call to unlock a feature we could see but not click. Another had a dashboard with seventeen tabs, most of which we never touched. We spent an afternoon configuring statuses, roles, and "workflows" before a single user had submitted anything.
We're developers. We wanted to paste one link somewhere, let people post ideas, upvote the good ones, and show what we were actually building. That's it. Instead we were reading documentation to use a feedback board.
At some point one of us said the thing out loud: "This should have taken five minutes."
So we built the five-minute version
usermot is our answer to that afternoon. The whole idea is embarrassingly simple:
- A public board. People post ideas, others upvote them. The loudest signal rises on its own.
- A roadmap. Drag an idea into Planned or In Progress so people can see you're listening.
- A changelog. When you ship, close the loop. The people who asked get notified.
That's the entire product. No wizard. No "connect your stack." No sales call. You sign up, you get a link, you share it. Five minutes, like it should have been.
The one rule we refuse to break
Every product accumulates pressure to add "just one more thing." A big customer wants SSO-this, an enterprise checklist wants audit-that, and slowly the clean tool you loved turns into the seventeen-tab dashboard you left.
So we wrote down one rule and we keep it where we can see it:
If a feature makes the simple case harder, it doesn't ship.
A solo maker collecting feedback for a side project should have exactly as smooth an experience as a ten-person team. When the two goals conflict, the simple case wins. That's not a limitation we apologize for — it's the whole point.
It's also why our pricing is one flat number instead of a per-seat tax. You're free forever, and when you genuinely need more — a custom domain, private boards, your own branding — it's a flat $19/month. Not $19 per person. Not $19 that quietly becomes $60 as your team grows. Just $19.
What's next
We're building usermot in the open, using usermot to collect feedback on usermot — which is either a good sign or a terrible idea, and we'll let you be the judge. If you've ever kept a feedback spreadsheet you swore you'd clean up, this is for you.
Post an idea. Upvote something. Watch us ship it.
— The usermot team