My favorite products of the year (for high-output, low-budget teams like us 😃)

Hi indiehackers! Our team is tiny, we can count everyone on two hands. Because of that, we always focus on getting the biggest output with the smallest(actually, "0") budget. So, I'd like to share the best free tools we tried this year. We focused on tools that help us with user feedback, since that’s how we always grow our product. Hope this list is helpful for your team, too!

In-app survey

Survicate : This was the easiest setup among the free options I tried. It's a huge time-saver thanks to the abundance of templates. You won't need to overthink question design.

Hotjar : Since it’s primarily a heatmap tool, we loved that we could link survey results directly to the respondent's session recording.

Public feedback board

Canny : This is great for managing the entire feedback loop in one place like collecting, sorting, roadmap planning, and changelog updates.

SlashPage : It handles the full feedback loop just like Canny, but offers unlimited boards and feedback items. We loved that it also has great built-in SEO/AEO support.

Featurebase : It also manages the entire feedback loop, and we appreciated that it provides free translation support for our global users.

User interview

Read AI : After a video interview, it provides a transcript, content summary, and screen recording. The rich data output really reduced the time we spent on meeting documentation.

Caret : It records, summarizes, and analyzes any conversation, whether it's a phone call or a video chat. With a built-in AI bot, this also made tidying up our meeting notes a breeze.

(Note: Read AI had a slightly better word recognition rate between the two.)

Community monitoring

F5Bot : This one is incredibly useful! It sends us an email alert whenever a post containing our registered keywords pops up. This saved us the hassle of manually browsing countless subreddits and communities.

I’ll keep this list updated as we try more things. We also put together a complete guide and checklist on how to use these tools to 100% improve your product. You can find that here: https://slashpage.com/slashpage/What-Are-the-Best-Free-User-Feedback-Tools-for-Small-Teams-in-2025

What are your best tools of 2025? Let me know below :)