The pricing decision that opened the door

Why the exodus felt real

Canny's December 2025 pricing change wasn't a gentle adjustment. For studios running 5 to 30 apps, the math broke. Suddenly, the per-app cost of capturing user feedback was no longer an afterthought. It was a line item that made spreadsheets hurt.

The moment that crystallised it for me came when a founder from Dublin told us, 'We've got 12 apps. Canny's per-app model means we're paying like a 500-person company when we're really 15 people in a flat.' She wasn't angry. She was just... tired of paying for something that didn't fit how she actually worked.

What struck me wasn't the complaints. It was the subtext. These weren't refugees from a bad tool. They were teams who'd outgrown the economics of a tool that was never designed for studios in the first place.

The thing we got right by accident

Six months before that exodus, we'd launched Shpd with a pricing structure that felt almost quaint in retrospect. We binned the per-app model entirely. Instead, we asked a simpler question: how many apps do you actually want to run feedback through?

Our Studio tier (£19 a month) covered 5 apps. Scale (£49) covered unlimited apps. And because we'd built a cross-app voter identity system from the ground up, a single user could vote for a feature across every app in your portfolio and get a push notification the moment it shipped. No spreadsheets. No admin overhead. No separate accounts per app.

When the Canny exodus started, we didn't have to rebuild anything. We just had to exist and answer the phone.

What we hadn't anticipated was how much this would matter to studios that weren't even our customers yet. The founders messaging us weren't looking for an upgrade path. They were looking for a floor. A place where the maths made sense again.

A decision we had to make fast

Around week three of the exodus, I realised we had a choice. We could price this like a fire sale, undercut Canny by 70%, and build a business on desperation. Or we could hold our pricing, because the underlying value had always been real. The timing was just lucky.

We held the line. We didn't run ads. We didn't pitch aggressively. What we did was ship. We'd already built the native iOS and Android SDKs that Canny doesn't have. The push notifications when a feature ships. The public roadmap pages that rank in Google. The Passport system that lets your voters stay logged in across all your apps without juggling passwords.

And we made one decision that mattered: our billing is Stripe, not StoreKit. When a founder saw we weren't skimming 15% off the top of her bill because of App Store rules, it landed. She told three other founders. Those three told five more.

By the time we hit 100 studio customers, we'd barely spent money on marketing. Our pricing hadn't changed. Our product hadn't pivoted. We'd just built something that made sense for the market that actually existed.

What changed once we were no longer the new option

The weird thing about sudden growth is that you spend the first month thinking it'll reverse. By month two, you realise it won't.

We started getting requests for features we hadn't built because we didn't know they'd matter. One studio with 18 apps asked if they could white-label Shpd, strip our branding, and present it as their own internal feedback system. Another wanted an AI digest that summarised feature requests across all their apps in a single portfolio view. A third asked if we could layer Attribr retention data on top of their feature requests so they could see which feedback came from users who were actually churning.

That's when we created Portfolio tier. £99 a month. It included white-label capability, the AI digest, and the Attribr retention overlay. It was ambitious. But we built it because we had the breathing room. The pricing change that displaced 100 studios gave us the mandate to build for them seriously.

The ironic part is that most of those 100 didn't upgrade immediately. They landed on Studio or Scale and stayed there. But they knew the product would grow with them. That felt different from Canny. That felt like a company that was thinking about their long-term problems, not quarterly pricing increases.

The part we still think about

I get asked sometimes if we'd planned this. If we'd somehow anticipated Canny's move and timed our launch around it.

We hadn't. We launched Shpd because we built apps ourselves at MRVL and got tired of asking users for feedback through web forms while they were sitting in the iOS or Android experience. We built native SDKs because we wanted a better way. The pricing structure followed naturally from that. No per-app nonsense. Just: how many apps do you have? How much do you want to pay?

What the Canny moment taught me is that sometimes the best business decision is also the most honest one. We didn't suddenly become good at app studio feedback because a competitor raised prices. We'd always been good at it. We'd just built it for ourselves first, and the market was searching for something like that. When the displacement happened, they found us.

The hundred studios didn't come because of clever timing. They came because we'd solved a problem nobody else was solving. The pricing change just made them listen.