Your changelog tool is probably billing you for people who never opened it
A changelog widget is one of the easiest wins in product. You are already shipping; the only thing missing is telling anyone. Drop in a script, get a little "what's new" badge in your header, and customers stop asking for features you launched four months ago.
Then the invoice arrives, and it is indexed to something you did not expect.
The definition worth reading twice
Beamer prices on monthly active users. Their pricing page defines an MAU as a unique user who accesses any page where Beamer's script is embedded.
Not a user who opens the changelog. Not one who clicks the badge, or reads a post, or reacts to one. A user who loads a page that contains the script.
This is not a trick — it is written plainly on their pricing page, and plenty of tools price on reach. But the consequence is easy to miss at install time, because it inverts the advice you will get about where to put the widget.
Every changelog vendor, reasonably, tells you to put the badge somewhere persistent: your app's top nav, the header, the account menu. That is the placement that gets a changelog actually read instead of ignored. It is also the placement that puts the script on every page of your product, which makes your changelog meter identical to your product's overall MAU.
The arithmetic
Beamer's entry plan is $49/mo on annual billing ($59 monthly) and covers 1,000 MAU. The published ceiling is $249/mo at 50,000 MAU, and past your allowance it is $50 per additional 5,000 users.
Follow that through for a product with 60,000 monthly users:
| Your product's MAU | Changelog readers | What the changelog costs |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | however many | $49/mo |
| 50,000 | however many | $249/mo |
| 60,000 | however many | $249/mo + $100 |
The middle column never enters the calculation. A product where 200 people read every post and one where nobody has clicked the badge in a year pay exactly the same, if their traffic matches.
That is the part worth sitting with. The bill for your changelog is a function of your product's success, not your changelog's.
Why this shape keeps appearing
It is not unique to changelogs. Look across feedback tooling and nearly every tool meters something that grows when the tool works:
- Canny bills per tracked user — anyone who posts, votes or comments. $79/mo covers 100 of them. A voting board that catches on crosses that quickly, and catching on was the entire point.
- Survicate bills per response: $114/mo for 500 a month, with overage fees above the cap. A survey nobody answers is cheap.
- Marker.io caps page views at 5,000/mo on its entry plan, which is comfortable for a staging site and small for a production one.
The pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming when you evaluate any of them: what does this vendor count, and does that number go up when the tool does its job?
What to check before you install
Three questions, in order:
- Find the unit. On the pricing page, locate the sentence that defines what is counted. It is usually one line and it is usually not in the big type. "MAU", "tracked user", "response", "seat", "page view".
- Ask whether you control it. Seats you control — you decide who gets one. Responses, votes and page views you mostly do not, and you specifically do not control them in the direction you want, which is up.
- Price the success case, not today. Take the number you hope to reach in a year if the tool works exactly as intended, and find it on the pricing table. That is the real price. The number on the plan card is the price of it not working yet.
Where we land
We built Feedback Magic flat, and the changelog is one of six widgets included rather than a product with its own meter: $29/mo for five widgets on one project, $79/mo for twenty-five across five projects. Page views, readers, voters and responses are unlimited and never counted. A changelog on a product with 60,000 monthly users costs the same as one with 600.
Two things to weigh against that, honestly:
Beamer has a free tier at 1,000 MAU. We have none — a 7-day trial, then a plan. If you are below that line and expect to stay there, free beats flat and it is not close.
Beamer is a specialist and we are not. They have spent years on changelog specifically — segmentation, scheduling, a standalone hosted feed, notification behaviour. If a changelog is the one thing you need and you need it deep, a dedicated tool is a legitimate answer. Ours is one of six surfaces that share a dashboard, which is the right trade only if you actually want the other five.
The comparison including the rows where they beat us is on our comparison page — every price dated, and linked to the vendor's own page so you can check it rather than trust us.
Every competitor number here was read off that vendor's own pricing page. We checked our figures against the "best alternatives" listicles that rank for these searches, and three of six were materially wrong — so please do go and verify, including our own.
On the numbers: every competitor price here was read off that vendor's own pricing page on July 26, 2026, not from a comparison listicle — three of the six we first checked were materially wrong. Pricing changes; if you are reading this much later, check the vendor's page and tell us if we are stale.
One flat plan for all six feedback surfaces → Feedback, surveys, visual annotation, changelog, a voting board and testimonials. Embed them or send them as a link. Responses are never metered. 7-day free trial, no card.