Show HN: SnoopForms – Open-Source Typeform Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SnoopForms – Open-Source Typeform Alternative

snoopforms.com

122 pointsbeanclap60 comments

I love this pricing model of .02 per submission for the pro plan. Often, as an agency, our customer or project needs are “lumpy” in terms of usage and the monthly base fees are a serious margin killer. The usage based fee like a cloud provider would charge is awesome for our use case.

that was the idea, great to hear it resonates!

Is there a hard limit/upper cap?

What stops some spammer from ramming the bill?

This is very important. I'm rather averse to signing up for paid service which is only limited by the option I provide for payments. It took me years to be willing to put a service on autopay which is merely variable, such as a power bill.

So ideally, we have:

- free plan no CC needed (e.g. 100 submissions) - extended free plan with CC (e.g. 500 submissions) - paid plan with cost control (e.g. don't spend more than 25$)

Would that alleviate your doubts?

Cost control is important, but I appreciate that structure. I skipped all services like this because it costed me less to have a dynamic website hosted on digital ocean than a static website with a form service.

With this service that is pay-per-use, I can finally "afford it". Thank you!

This is very cool, there's definitely a need for something that sits between the completely no-code tools and a completely DIY approach.

Your submission-based pricing is also very approachable to small-volume forms -- the industry standard is about a $25-35 minimum monthly, and even though there's often a free tier it usually includes a small subset of features.

One thing that's a blocker for me at the moment is that I can't seem to add text besides the field name to a field in the no-code tool. It's useful for providing instructions on the field, but I don't see a way to do it.

Overall this feels pretty polished, I'm impressed.

thanks for the feedback, Paul :-) currently you can add text blocks above or below the questions and add there any instructions you like. but you are right, there are no dedicated help texts, etc. at the moment. but I think we will have a good solution for that very soon

As a former Typeform user, I like this. I actually like that it doesn't look too much like Typeform. I did notice in a comment that you want to have an option to "Typformerize" a form, which is neat because it gives the user the option for it even if I wouldn't use it myself. I also really like your landing page design, very easy to parse and read.

thanks! :) Correct, we see the appeal from the Typeform UX but actually see snoop as more than a tool to create beautiful forms. Data collection is just the entry point.

From the name "snoop" forms, I genuinely thought this was some kind of tracking/telemetry forms tool. It's not.

hey! Interesting, this is kinda where we came from.

We thought that with a form you always try to get as much information as possible, hence your "snooping" around.

You took it a step further, good that extensive form analytics are coming :)

I wouldn't want to have to list on my privacy policy that we use a tool called snoop anything.

Change the name.

fair point, we'll consider

SomethingForm (by SnoopTool)

forms.com :D

OpenForms dot something

Yep. My gdpr obsessed dpo would have kittens. Other than that it looks great!

Sadly I have to agree.

Data privacy is a key driver for me to not use something like Typeform and to choose something with supposedly better privacy features.

It’s a shame to nitpick on the name, but I do feel that having “snoop” in the brand name is not a good move for the target audience segment that I fall into!

I don't disagree in this case, yet Little Snitch doesn't really have this problem. Then again, it's more obvious that the Snitch is on your side.

You should really fix the spelling of "HIPAA" on the front page if you want to be taken seriously as advertising a HIPAA-compliant piece of software.

Nice project. I'm not sure about the name though. "snoop" has some nefarious connotations..."snooping around":

> investigate or look around furtively in an attempt to find out something, especially information about someone's private affairs.

Be careful using the Typeform name. Someone I know did a tutorial on how to build a typeform clone and got a cease and desist. They aren’t friendly.

I might be an outlier but not a big fan of the pricing model.

$0.02 per submission can get very expensive very fast. For 10,000 submissions, it will cost the user $200 where as Typeform costs $83 for the same[1]. Is it really that expensive to store 10,000 rows of data?

I understand the other features provided with the storage such as analytics and integrations but it still doesn't justify the cost imo.

While you can argue that you offer self-hosting as well and as someone who is a big fan of self-hosting(I self-host over 8+ apps[2]), It's another thing I can self-host if I need to someday and I thank you for making it self-hostable/open-source. But from my experience, only very technical users self-host apps.

[1] https://www.typeform.com/pricing/

[2] https://vikashbajaj.substack.com/p/the-slippery-slope-of-sel...

If it's really not that expensive, couldn't you just self-host it? I think the developer is just trying to make a reasonable amount for providing a service for those who don't want to self-host.

As someone who self-hosts a lot of apps myself[1], I can assure you it's not easy to self-host/maintain the apps. Even for very technical people, it still takes a lot of effort to self-host apps(setup server, run in docker, configure a web proxy like caddy/nginx, provision ssl certificates, add firewall security etc) along with doing regular db backups just for one person.

[1] https://vikashbajaj.substack.com/p/the-slippery-slope-of-sel...

Try something like cloudron or yunohost for selfhosting

I will try them out, thanks for the suggestion

I am sorry I failed to understand, so you just want everything for free?

The developer should not only open source his/her work but also host it free for you?

Typeform costs $83 for 10,000 responses[1](it's reliable, been around for almost a decade, used by leading companies around the world and it provides way more features than this) where as snoopforms will cost $200 for the same number of responses. That is more than 200% markup.

I am merely comparing prices here.

[1] https://www.typeform.com/pricing/

You are absolutely right and we are aware of this as we calculated it through.

Pricing an OS project isn't easy and we will introduce scaled prices per submission e.g. 500-2.000 -> 0,02$, 2.000-10.000 -> 0,01$ and > 10.000 -> 0,005$ or so.

We just didnt want to make it too complicated early on.

That makes sense. All the best. I will definitely recommend Snoopforms to people I know. I generally self-host whenever I can and I will self-host this when I need this in future. I hope I can still pay one-time fee down the line when I need it/self-host to support the project. Thanks

Great looking site! It took less than a minute to create a first form. Very intuitive. Just the 'Submit' button on the form create page was a bit confusing as it didn't do anything. Good job!

cool, I'll think about the UX confusion and see if I can come up with a fix. Thanks! :)

Is there a form SaaS that allows the admin to give feedback on the form submission and then have the user resubmit their form?

I run a coaching business and I’d like my students to be able to submit their work for feedback and review. Then if they need to make changes, I’d like to make it as easy as possible for them to resubmit the form with tweaks to their submission.

Looks great! Is there a company (e.g., LLC) behind this? I don't see any information about it in the Imprint section.

Wow this is awesome! We have been building similar pipelines on top of CognitoForms but this is a much easier fit.

Oh really? It would be super valuable to talk to you about what you built and why. Please shoot me a message at hola@snoopforms.com or in the Discord - I'll try to reach you via Codeday.org as well :)

Is there an API to pull answers from?

we don't have an official API documentation yet. But we have a REST-API for everything that the frontend uses, so that shouldn't be a problem.

hoi!

we just launched the first public beta of Typeform open-source tool snoopForms.

Apart from OS, we want to differentiate by:

- offering code & no-code interfaces to create forms (beta) - offering in-depth form analytics & improvement tools like A/B testing (tba) - granular and conditional data piping i.e. "if newsletter checkbox is set, send name & email field to SendGrid". Essentially, well integrated and GDPR compliant Zapier

What do you think?

Awesome. Always good to have more open source products. Will you make it easier to make forms look like Typeform?

Hey! Yes, this has been requested a few times. Thinking of a "Typformerize" Toggle :)

Will handling signatures be on your roadmap?

that would be cool! Actually, it's fairly easy to integrate as there are existing tools we can use. I'll add it to the feature requests, good idea :)

Since you are german: Your website is in violation of the GDPR and german law in general. Fix those problems immediately or I will report you.

Yikes. Even the Discord embed is saving some cookies. How can you launch something in this day and age and not loose a single thought on GDPR?

Who pissed in your cereal?

You are right, sorry about that. In the last iteration of our footer redesign these informations were accidentally removed. We have added the pages again and republished the website. Since the discord plugin also concerned you, we now removed it from our website.

Great

There's a way to point this out without the hostility.

I threatened the report because I wanted to annoy the OP who seems to be a leftist. I can only threaten OP this way because leftists created this stupid GDPR legislation, which I have to deal with almost every day.

A report to the ULD will also most likely only result in a slap on the wrist.

I actually did them a favor by pointing out their problems, because some german law firms use crawlers to detect GDPR and other violations. They then send cease-and-desist orders and collect expensive legal fees for that.

An aggression uncalled for. Be better than that. Provide feedback, show empathy, and assume people here are acting in good faith - because more often than not - they do so.

Is that politically loaded marketing working?

what do you mean? Elon?

Yes, do you see an impact in conversion if you A/B test that with or without political load?

We are not A/B testing the video, I just thought it was funny.

Why do you respond in such a hostile manner to a legitimate question? Why even put this stuff on the page? It makes you look like a really bitter, childish and hateful person.

I took his response to be that of uncertainty, and asking if it was related to the (definitely inappropriate) Elon reference. Your response is coming across just as hostile, as is the top-level comment you posted. There are other ways you could have approached both of these comments.

yes you got the right idea, I simply wasn't sure if my certainly questionable humor is considered "political".

We took it out, I guess the less edge you offer these days the better off you are :)

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