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Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms

ikiform.com

190 pointspreetsuthar1795 comments

Hey HN,

I'm a solopreneur and run a web design agency.

I create open-source apps, but I also work as a freelancer and designer. I was accepting any new freelance project via forms on my agency website.

I was using Typeform, but as time went by and more people submitted forms, it got more and more expensive. That time, I thought to use Google Form, but it was way too blocky and looked very unprofessional on my agency website.

So I thought to build my own forms for my own usage, and it turns out it almost doubled form submissions and inquiry calls.

I was happy, so I thought to build it for everyone and make it open-source.

I added AI functionalities using Vercel AISDK. I can generate forms almost instantly using AI and also added analytics AI so that users can talk with their forms—more like talk with their analytics data.

I've been building this publicly, sharing updates on my X account (preetsuthar17)

I hope this product will be as helpful to you as it was for me. Would love your feedback pls

Preet

Open articleView on HN

The reason Typeform free tier limits are so strict is likely because they have run the numbers based on real usage data. I am sure those limits are designed to capture just enough free users who are likely to convert, while minimizing the risk of churn. It is tricky.

From my own experience, about two years ago we built an AI form builder tech demo on top of our platform. We open-sourced it (https://github.com/chatbotkit/example-nextjs-ai-forms) to see if there was community interest. Not much. Since it wasn't our core product, we pivoted and turned it into a low-cost Typeform alternative with unlimited forms - formshare.ai was born. And while we have seen some modest commercial success, I wouldn't claim it's anywhere near Typeform's scale.

The takeaway here is that for this project, even though it wasn't our primary focus, leading with open source and undercutting on price didn't prove to be an effective strategy. If anything, charging too little initially will only devalue the product and attract the wrong kind of users - the ones less likely to convert or stick around for the long term.

The other reason for free limits is limiting abuse/weirdness from malicious users.

Or even more important: pathological users.

Actually malicious users are rare. Pathological users have a bias to be the _most_ demanding users when actually paying _the least_ (or nothing). It's a drain on every step in the support funnel. But what drives the business are users that both have a large scale of use and still have growth potential.

the worst tend to be just above the free tier, on the lowest paid plan available. Raising the minimum is an effective way to reduce this pain.

It is interesting how receiving the greatest benefit for the lowest cost is considered pathological, yet also the entire basis for our economic system.

    It is interesting how receiving the greatest benefit for the lowest cost is considered pathological, yet also the entire basis for our economic system.

What I read from GP's comment was not that this was the tradeoff, it was that people who pay less than market value tend to be the most troublesome customers. I can tell you that holds true in any market I've ever consulted for or have used myself. B2B transactions tend to be much smoother than a visit to Popeye's on the average.

Analysis: true, based on 20+ years of owning successful online businesses and another 15 in the software business before that. I always gave my tech support teams full authority to fire customers like that.

The part that fascinated me most was that just reminding them they had that option seemed to make them much more tolerant than I expected, and out of say 2 million customers I'd guess fewer than a dozen were ejected. I guess it was a mental pressure valve.

Formshare looks like a great product. Never seen an AI form like that. A product like that is 90% marketing, though. Trying to get that in front of people's eyeballs is hard work.

> An open-source alternative to Typeform and Google Forms

Those two are the two extreme ends of the target audience archetypes. So, decide which is yours.

> I was using Typeform, but as time went by and more people submitted forms, it got more and more expensive.

When people say they build cheaper alternatives, I often assume that the original is becoming better and more successful. Competing on price rarely wins.

I've found https://formbricks.com to be kinda the closest competition to Typeform, and also Open Source.

formbricks is awesome, best open source surveys out there! :))

I used to work at Typeform and I think it's a testament to their product that people have been inspired to make open source versions of it multiple times over the past decade or so.

I enjoy seeing posts like this.

I recall using open source form builders over a decade before they came on the scene

A lot of comments here are saying that competing on price is a losing proposition, but I think they’re forgetting that this is a solo project and not a 500 person company that’s trying to be as profitable as possible to be attractive for acquisition like Typeform. The bar for success for a solo project is far lower.

Typeform has to blow money on a lot of overhead that this author doesn’t have.

And let’s not just ignore a whole bunch of products that ousted market leaders specifically because they competed on price/value. Examples include: Google Docs, Mailchimp, a gigantic list of Adobe competitors, Unity, Backblaze, Robinhood, and the list goes on.

I tried my best :)

Didn't Google Docs win because it was online and (more) mobile-friendly, not because it was free? Almost everyone had Office on their PCs at the time, but not on their tablets.

My view is that where Google workspace apps have won, it’s on price (for enterprise) or because it’s free (for easy online sharing, etc.)

Disclosure: I used to work at Typeform 2014 - 2016

Taking a look at the demo (https://www.ikiform.com/forms/a2675039-5901-4052-88c0-b60977...), I'm not sure where the comparison to Typeform comes in. Probably the most unique feature of Typeform is the focus on user experience of the forms themselves, everything else is/was mostly built to support the forms, and making it as easy to fill out as possible. Things like the back button always being visible, no validation of fields as you enter data, no progress indication and so all makes it seem like there is a lot of polish left to do.

I guess the form looks OK, which is alright of course, but I'm not sure it actually serves as an alternative to Typeform. It seems to me to sit somewhere in-between the traditional (ugly) form providers, and Typeform, which isn't a bad place to sit at, but maybe people expecting a Typeform-like experience would feel slightly bait-and-switched by the comparison.

There used to be another open source project that replicated the form themselves and the experience (as far as I remember), but seem defunct by now (for the last 6 years...): https://github.com/tellform/tellform Besides that, seems there are some other open source alternatives, but I can't say I've tried them all (at a glance, Quill Forms seems most similar to Typeform): https://github.com/search?q=typeform+archived%3Afalse&type=r...

I think they are using Typeform as form app. With an external view Tally, Typeform, Hotform are all the same, apps that make forms. I have use all of them, but I cannot remember their differences.

Maybe the UX of a Typeform is OK but the Typeform app to build forms is virtually unusable for anyone that actually needs forms. The most basic settings are hidden behind unrelated, unlabeled buttons. Because theres not enough white space already on the page obviously. The way they've architected pages and components, totally inflexible and leads to very unnatural flows in a lot of cases. To date I have never seen an integration UX worse than Typeform's. Using Airtable for example, a single alteration needed means resetting and reconfiguring the entire field mapping. You can have a borked integration config and have NO idea from within the app. Building with typeform takes easily 5x longer than any other form tool we've used. The call to action "Book a Free Strategy Call" is 25 characters. Typeform's native popup embed has an arbitrary 24 character limit on the button's text. "Book a Free Strategy Cal" is the exact kind of garbage I expect from a site that uses Typeform. Yes, there's (undocumented) workarounds.

With a number of team members we paid Typeform $100+ each month for this experience.

I found Tally and immediately got agreement to migrate every (~50) Typeforms to it. Canceled Typeform sub and haven't looked back.

> Authorize Forms0 > Authorize preetsuthar17 > Authorizing will redirect to https://dodgmiigvrqvlsvwhlqv.supabase.co

I know you are only asking for the Email address but at least, for my benefit, make it look like a real SME or a serious project.

Very important thing missing: a demo form, to understand the user experience.

Especially if you’re comparing yourself with Typeform, which is rather controversial. (I detest its entire approach.)

I see a demo form if you click on the demo, but it's not very obvious

still if you want to try the demo you can try here

https://www.ikiform.com/forms/a2675039-5901-4052-88c0-b60977...

OK, initial feedback: you need to work on your colours and contrasts. Disabled Previous button isn’t clearly disabled, placeholder value looks almost the same as an actual value, focus indicator is too subtle. I reckon these things are noticeably harder to get right on dark than on light colour schemes.

Also keyboard navigation is poor: when you shift to a new page, you should probably focus the first field; or at the very least reset focus to the start of the document so that when the user presses Tab after having clicked the Next button they get to the first field, not the footer “Powered by Ikiform” link. (This doesn’t affect pressing Enter from one of the inputs—when they disappear, focus shifts back to the top.)

But I’m pleased to say that it’s nothing like Typeform. I strongly recommend ditching any comparison with it, you’re doing things sanely, unlike their experience.

It’s a nice form. On iOS when I hit next it didn’t pop me up to the beginning of the next page. Agree with the sibling that it would be nice to get focus on that next obvious step.

The name fields have a minimum length of two characters. There are people with single character names.

Mandatory reading for anyone implementing forms with names: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [0].

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Thanks for the link … great read and yes very tricky.

I have started hacking a bit on a Contact::Name text parser in raku Grammars if anyone would like to check it out - contributions are very welcome! https://raku.land/zef:librasteve/Contact

Why Raku?

  - the easy built in Grammar syntax means that coders can work quickly to build structured parse trees that can deal with all the textual nuance (unicode, language, rtl, pluggable sub-grammars…)

  - the consistent ecosystem provides for class / roles as first class packages in their own right, so we can have a shared standardized tree of real word objects we want to parse out of text such as LLM responses

I was actually working on the demo and adding it in the home page

yeah, looks like animations between pages is lacking. as well as just animatinos in general

I didn’t notice they were lacking. Are animations really asked for by users?

They're not explicitly asked for, but everywhere I've worked that's tested them has found that they improve conversion rates.

+1. users don't ask such things. they can't formulate them in writing (unless they are designers, artists, visual editors, UX experts themselves) and don't have time for that

do your follow any design guideline? what's your design principles?

I recommend picking some (e.g. Apple: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), and try to match that. there has been lots of though put into it, good to reuse before you came up with your own.

What is the value proposition for these form libraries? Is it scale? Is it the custom builder? How complex are people's HTML forms these days from a UX perspective?

I was browsing the code, and noticed this forms library was using Supabase, presumably a paid service if this OSS library takes off. I just can't seem to grasp why a custom form building library needs a 3rd party, managed Database included. Scale maybe?

These are genuine questions as I'm woefully unaware of the state of HTML forms / Frontend in 2025

They are not libraries, they are form builders.

You create the form / survey without touching code and without provisioning or setup any infrastructure.

They are particular useful to companies wanting to do surveys without involving a development team

There's a few reasons. The biggest one, IMO, is that it lets non-technical users change things quickly without having to go through the engineering team. Obviously there are limits to that, but in many cases, a product or marketing team wants to modify a form or test a few variations without having to put it into a backlog, wait for engineers to size it, wait for an upcoming sprint, then wait another two weeks for it to get completed and deployed. (Even in more nimble organizations, cutting out the handoff to engineering saves time, eliminates communication issues, and frees up the engineering team to do more valuable work.)

On the technical side, these form builders can actually save a decent amount of development effort. Sure, it's easy to build a basic HTML form, but once you start factoring in things like validation, animations, transitions, conditional routing, error handling, localization, accessibility, and tricky UI like date pickers and fancy dropdowns, making a really polished form is actually a lot of work. You either have to cobble together a bunch of third-party libraries and try to make them play nicely together, or you end up building your own reusable, extensible, modular form library.

It's one of those projects that sounds simple, but scope creep is almost inevitable. Instead of spending your time building things that actually make money, you're spending time on your form library because suddenly you have to show different questions on the next screen based on previous responses. Or you have to handle right-to-left languages like Arabic, and it's not working in Safari on iOS. Or your predecessor failed to do any due diligence before deciding to use a datepicker widget that was maintained by some random guy at a web agency in the Midwest that went out of business five years ago, and now you have to fork it because there's a bug that's impacting your company's biggest client.

Or, instead of all that, you could just pay Typeform a fraction of the salary for one engineer and never have to think about those things ever again.

Form builders are a hard business to succeed with. Quite a lot of companies started off as a general “form builder” product and then found success by specializing into specific uses of forms. Examples include Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, Open Water, etc. Quite a lot of other companies stick with generic forms and get stuck and stagnate.

The reason is that forms are like dates, time, addresses, names, to-do lists, etc. They are things that many developers need to work with, but are way deeper and more complicated than they seem at first. See the wide variety of feedback and suggestions just in this HN thread.

So I would recommend specializing if you want to gain traction. And expect to do tons of marketing.

> And expect to do tons of marketing.

Fun fact: Typeform basically did no "traditional" marketing in the beginning of its life, and most users came from the "Powered by Typeform" button in the bottom right, which was visible for every free form IIRC. Those users, also publishing their own forms, led to more users finding Typeform from that same button.

When does a marketing tactic become “traditional”? Putting ‘Powered By’ tags on products goes back at least 20 years.

Is it a traditional marketing tactic to rely largely on something as subtle as powered-by links? (Genuine question, I haven't studied marketing beyond a few documentaries.)

Unless there's a sea change, a minor tactic can continue to exist but not be "traditional" indefinitely.

> When does a marketing tactic become “traditional”?

The original message was:

> And expect to do tons of marketing.

Which putting a "Powered by" button isn't, it's basically a software, UX and design task instead. I guess by "traditional" marketing I meant the type of activities that require active effort to do, compared to something like that.

Poked around the code a little bit, it doesn't seem that it is intended to be able to drop into another project and then use as a custom form builder for that project. Any plans for something like this? A lot of the infrastructure and framework (next/js) seem heavily built into the codebase. I would have to use supabase?

If you're working towards something that developers can drop in, take a look at https://heyform.net/. If not, then it's still nice to be able to have some freedom on the deployment.

"This deployment is temporarily paused" it seems you spent all your vercel quota.

You would "scale" better with a $5 vps

Definitely. But OP is probably on free tier, thats why this happens

Vercel is fine for stage deployment but for production even a solar powered raspberry pi is better, if vercel willpause the instance if there is too much traffic.

Looks great! However i'm a bit concerned about these "AI-Powered Analytics", looks like it would leak user-submitted data to Groq.com?

I'm curious why you think that?

Many AI products use user data; how do they handle it?

> Many AI products use user data; how do they handle it?

They leak the data, at least while finding PMF.

If they make enough money maybe they'll run their own model.

I see, what do you think would be best for me to do?

> I see, what do you think would be best for me to do?

Not sure. One option that comes to mind is to put the AI usage behind a one-time-only popup that confirms (via a checkbox) that the user understand that by using the AI features, their information will necessarily have to be sent to a third-party AI processor.

If they decline those terms, then the AI button/boxes go back to being disabled. If they accept the terms and conditions for AI, then record that in their profile and don't display the terms and conditions for AI usage again.

So even though you are still leaking their data, at least it will be with their express permission.

alright! I understood I should just add consent in user settings if they want to allow AI services to use their data etc etc

The Google and Microsoft Forms solutions always seem like a fantastic fit until you actually try to seriously use them for clients.

I’ve run into this too.

I had a client that needed to collect HIPAA protected data. Putting their marketing site into scope for HIPAA was not a sane choice. Their EMR vendor didn’t have any options that didn’t require migrating to a new EMR offering in order to create/publish/accept forms. All the other options were clunky and required a lot more work and niche expertise or training in those applications.

So we went with Google Forms. They already used Google Workspace and had executed the HIPAA addendum to the terms.

That lasted less than a year. The physicians and patients were both put off by the fact that it was a Google Form and it looked unprofessional.

They’re back to posting PDFs on their website.

I'm probably in the minority here but I don't find Google Forms unprofessional, much like I don't find Google Docs or Sheets unprofessional. That said, I hate TypeForm and its auto-scrolling behavior.

Their specific complaint was that because the forms often become part of a medical record, it just didn’t look right. Reading between the lines, they had comments from patients saying “a Google Form? Seems sketch.”

I don’t necessarily think that a Google Form is unprofessional either. It was accepting data into an environment that complied with their regulatory needs, which was a chief driver of the project.

I absolutely agree with you about TypeForm. Actually, if I was going to call a form service unprofessional “looking”, TypeForm takes the top slot. That’s not a criticism exactly. I just don’t think I’d use it for something that is public facing. It has a different kind of UX than I’d want to place in front of users.

At a first glance it looks great!

However, it looks like "too much" for what we're looking for. It seems to depend on too many external services. Does anyone know such a form creation system that can be self-hosted, has minimal dependencies, and is open source?

Under 'Is Ikiform open source':

> Ikiform is completely open-source and available on GitHub

The link on the word Github should probably link to the actual repo or org and not the github homepage, I would imagine?

I fixed it thank you for pointing out!

Seems it's https://github.com/preetsuthar17/ikiform, linked in the footer.

Seems to be missing a proper license though. The only thing mentioning anything about the licensing seems to be https://github.com/preetsuthar17/Ikiform/blob/e9f1fb8b68eb1c...

> Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of the materials (information or software) on Ikiform's website for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only.

The license added (MIT) seems to conflict with these terms too..

There doesn't seem to be anyway to use this without a real verified google or github account.

Not sure that a product which is pitched as an alternative to current big incumbents is going to benefit from forcing users to first be logged into current big corporate.

What's the rationale here? That there are google users who are looking to stay with google for everything but forms? That must be an awfully niche market, no?

I can't believe that Typeform is the standard in the industry. Is it me or does the whole product have a constant delay to the UI? Also the form building part seems really bad. Nothing is intuitive. Not a fan of one question per page. Also why is it so hard to add multiple questions per page. I had to Google how to do that just to find the option.

Looks like it shows a Vercel error: "This deployment is temporarily paused" as for now. https://web.archive.org/web/20250710190011/https://www.ikifo...

I recently had to do a form and just asked claude to 1. Write up the form with the questions styled with tailwind, shadcn, heroui. 2. Wire it up and give me a cloudflare function to write to a KV store 3. Instructions on how to setup above with cloudflare free tier.

It got it in the first shot, took me <3-4mins to copy paste in cloudflare. Been working well so far, the page is also hosted on cloudflare pages and hasnt cost anything so far.

Aren't Typeform, Google Forms, Microsoft Forms all basically similar in that they are good for surveys etc. but not for much else? Airtable ( https://airtable.com ) has more typical forms and so does Visual DB ( https://visualdb.com ).

What kind of setup did you have that Typeform was costly? We are on the $299/month plan coming from $99/month, and if you run a money making business of Typeform, this cost should be negligible compared to all other costs of running a business.

$299 per month for a form? Damn, I'm in the wrong business.

I understand the value proposition but those margins are eye watering.

I find it baffling that people are paying $300/month for what amounts to a simple set of HTML and a simple backend. That's insane.

For what it’s worth, I searched for an alternative and ended up finding deftform.com on appsumo with an affordable lifetime subscription. I’m very pleased as it replaces a bunch of other apps I was using like Google Forms and hellosign.

Looks good - I was only able to use the demo partially. The page needed access to: client.crisp.chat , pbs.twimg.com ; assets.onedollarstats.com ; and googletagmanager.com .

I'm assuming I can remove these dependencies for my own use?

Word to anyone using Google forms for public-facing functions. Try it without a Google account. Somtimes the forms don't work (e.g. if they ask for an email address). Yes, some people aren't Google customers.

Demo form's phone number field accepts text, so no validation?

I didn't add any validation that's why it might be accepting text

> I didn't add any validation that's why it might be accepting text

See my directly reply above your reply.

> Demo form's phone number field accepts text, so no validation?

It validates email, though.

How would you validate phone numbers? Surely phone numbers must allow spaces as well. Maybe allow '+27' too? Quite a lot of exceptions come to mind for phone numbers.

What if someone wants to type in a phone such as `123 456 7891 ext 21`?

What if they want to use `0800 SAVE MUNNY`? That's the number `728 368 669`.

What if they want to enter `123 456 7891 oh/123 789 4561 ah`?

The classic phone number to allow through validation is “PLEASE DON'T CALL ME I'M DEAF”.

You can still read 2fa codes...

If you’re sending 2fa over sms then you’ve got bigger problems.

No, not universally. But also, it's not the form's role to block on those problems.

> Quite a lot of exceptions come to mind for phone numbers.

That's why proper form building isn't just slapping some style over a text field. You'll have to parse it anyway, so better not delay and risk accepting errors that the user could correct right away

I had created something as well - https://github.com/hsnice16/forming-typeform

The one-time price is interesting.

If the platform goes away in 1 year, it essenetially becomes 39$/year.

Any plans on how you'd make this a longer lasting product?

I'm still brainstorming new, unique features. As a solo developer and student, it's challenging to dedicate more time to projects

with a positive response, I'm willing to work full-time on this project

It’s a well-explored space with oodles of competition. “New, unique features” are likely to be unique for a reason (to speak plainly: because they’re bad or because no one paying wants them).

There is a reason why almost all ERP apps end up being almost the same. When you build a product with a USP that makes you special, at some point your client will ask for all the basic things that are required for that product (provided by your competitors) and generally for businesses this becomes the reason to stay with you; your USP and you providing everything else that is expected from the product category.

The point is, you have defined your USP. Its cheaper Typeform alternative for SMBs, stick with it and build the product around it and meet all the basic requirements first. Do some research and find out which features a typical form builder wants or which Typeform features are most used. Have those ready and then work on the other fancy things.

And have a number in mind, after X number of clients increase your price. And seriously increase your price now.

As a heavy user of Formsite, these would be the features I would prioritize:

- Logic branching (if question 1 answer is 'A', then hide question 2. etc) - Confirmation emails to the submitter - Widgets to insert design elements (static text, images, etc)

IMO, these are bare minimum for B2B business if you are interested in pursuing that.

Having said that, this is a great start.

Hi Preet, I think this is looking great, and a lot of features are present already. Two things to consider: I think your pricing is too low to be taken seriously by a lot of organizations; also, with a one-time payment support is an issue.

Second, to have a selling point, you might want to focus on privacy. Is the data shared in any way? Where is it kept? What measures have you taken to keep data safe? Will it be deleted if I cancel my account? That sort of things.

Anyway, good luck and keep on going!

Thank you for your feedback. I'm curious about what pricing would be acceptable and reasonable?

On iOS the pricing link doesn’t work and the browser back button also doesn’t work.

how many time have you been working on this?

Did it crash?

They hit their Vercel free-tier limit or spend limit.

fixed it

nice. would give it a try

yep! it's open source on github

https://github.com/preetsuthar17/Ikiform

bro your homepage lags a looot

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