Let me save you the Google search: there are approximately 4,000 articles about "how to collect user feedback" and about 3,990 of them end with "...and that's why you should buy our $99/month tool."
This isn't that article.
I'm going to walk through the exact stack I used to collect feedback across three indie apps, spending $0. I'll tell you what worked, what didn't, and at what point the free approach starts to crack.
Your app is on the App Store. People leave reviews. You can read them in App Store Connect.
This is the bare minimum, and honestly, it's where most indie devs stop. The problem is that App Store Connect is not designed for workflow. You can't tag reviews. You can't mark them as resolved. You can't search across multiple apps. You're reading reviews one at a time, in a UI that Apple clearly designed for someone, but not for you.
What works: You're getting real, unsolicited feedback from actual users. That's valuable.
What breaks: Scale. Once you have more than one app, or more than about 20 reviews per week, you're spending real time just reading, with no system for acting on what you read.
Every app needs a feedback channel that isn't the App Store. Here's why: the kind of person who leaves an App Store review is not the same person who would email you a bug report. Reviews are for venting. Direct feedback is for problem-solving.
The cheapest feedback form is a Google Form. Create one, link to it from your app's settings screen, done.
But Google Forms have real drawbacks. They look generic. You can't brand them. The responses land in a Google Sheet (see: my spreadsheet nightmare above). And there's no confirmation flow — the user submits their feedback and gets a Google "Your response has been recorded" page.
A better free option: host a simple form on your website. If you're running any kind of web presence — even a basic landing page — you can add a form that posts to a backend you control. This gives you branded design, custom confirmation messages, and data that lives in your database.
This is the highest-leverage, lowest-effort thing you can do: put a button somewhere in your app that opens a feedback form.
Not buried in Settings > About > Contact Us > Support. Visible. Accessible. Ideally on the main screen or in the navigation.
The reason this matters: users who hit a frustrating bug have about a 15-second window where they're willing to tell you about it. If your feedback button is three taps away, that window closes. They either leave a 1-star review, or they just close the app and never come back.
I've experimented with different placements. What works best: a small "Feedback" link in the bottom nav or the settings screen header. A shake-to-report gesture (users love this, weirdly). A prompt after a failed action: "Something go wrong? Tell us what happened."
All of these can point to a web form — no SDK needed, no native code, just a URL.
I was skeptical about this. QR codes for feedback? Feels like a pandemic gimmick.
Then I printed a QR code on the back of the business cards I hand out at meetups. The code links directly to my feedback form with a pre-filled field: "source: meetup."
My expectation: zero scans. What actually happened: 8 people scanned it. 5 of them submitted feedback. One of them reported a bug I'd been trying to reproduce for two weeks.
From a 30-person meetup. That's a 17% conversion rate. QR codes work because they lower friction to essentially zero. Scan, type, submit.
Every indie dev has a support email. And every indie dev's support inbox is a disaster.
Email works for feedback the way a junk drawer works for storage: everything goes in, nothing comes out. You get feedback mixed with spam, App Store receipts, and newsletters you forgot to unsubscribe from.
If you use email for feedback, at least create a filter. Route anything from specific addresses or with specific subject lines to a label or folder. It's not a real system, but it's better than nothing.
Here's my honest assessment: the $0 stack works up to about 30-50 feedback items per month across all sources. Beyond that, the lack of a central system becomes the bottleneck.
The breaking points: you miss things. A bug report sits in your email while the same bug gets a 1-star review. You can't see patterns — three users reported the same issue but you didn't connect them. You spend more time managing feedback than acting on it.
This is the point where you either build a system or pay for one. The good news: you don't need to spend $100/month. AppTriage's free plan covers 1 app with 100 feedback items/month. The paid plan is $19/month for up to 10 apps.
But even if you never use AppTriage — please, for the love of shipping, stop using a spreadsheet.
AppTriage gives you the whole stack in one tool: a free feedback form, QR code generation, and an app privacy policy generator — all connected to a single inbox. Start free.
