Form builders with a custom domain

Tally made two decisions at once: that a form should be written rather than assembled, and that most of what this category charges for should simply be free.

The editor behaves like a text document — you type, and a slash inserts a field — which is why ease of building is its strongest quality. There is no canvas to arrange and no field palette to learn. Value for money comes from the second decision: unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on the free plan, within a published fair-use policy, with conditional logic, calculations, signatures and file uploads included at no cost.

What you give up is control and polish. A document editor offers less layout freedom than a visual canvas, removing the Tally mark needs the Pro plan at $24 a month, and capturing part-finished responses is paid — so a plan that is generous about volume stays quiet about who nearly finished.

Fluent Forms competes on two numbers: how fast the form loads, and how much a single-site licence includes.

The mechanism is a plugin engineered to stay light, with the capabilities that usually mark a premium tier — conditional logic, calculations, save-and-resume — inside the licence rather than sold beside it. Value for money is the direct result: sixty-three dollars a year covers one site, and the agency and unlimited licences scale that without changing what a form can do. Customisation is part of the same undercutting, with custom CSS and JavaScript available rather than held back for a higher tier.

The cost is ecosystem. Payments and several integrations still sit on the higher licences, and the catalogue of third-party add-ons is smaller than the ones longer-established plugins have accumulated, so an unusual requirement is more likely to need building than buying. It also needs a WordPress site, like every plugin here.

forms.app removes the number that shapes almost every other pricing page in this category: the response cap.

Responses are unlimited on every plan, including the free one, and no credit card is required to stay there. Value for money is therefore not a calculation about volume at all — conditional logic, calculations, payments and signatures are available without watching a counter, and the decision becomes what the form should look like rather than how many people may fill it in.

The cost is that presentation is the entire ladder. Branding removal arrives on the first paid tier, a custom subdomain on the second, and a full custom domain plus partial responses only on the third — so a free form is an unmistakably branded one, and a long form on a lower plan records nothing until somebody presses submit.

Zoho Forms is priced like the suite it belongs to, which in practice means the numbers look wrong next to the standalone products.

The free tier allows 500 submissions a month, and the first paid step is $10 a month billed annually for 10,000. Approval routing, conditional rules, calculations and payment fields are all present, and what happens after submit reaches into the rest of the suite — a spreadsheet, an automation layer, a sales database — without buying a connector. Customisation runs deeper than the price implies, through a documented custom themes and CSS route and layout elements — grids, sections, page breaks — that rearrange a form rather than only recolour it.

The cost is everything that comes with being part of a suite. The interface follows suite conventions rather than form-builder conventions, the settings are numerous and scattered, and the value on offer is largely wasted if you have no intention of using anything else Zoho makes.

HeyForm is an open-source project with hosted plans attached, and that single fact changes what its price list means.

The hosted tiers are shaped by volume — $15 a month for five thousand responses, $24 for twenty thousand, $40 for a hundred and fifty thousand — which is where its value for money comes from. The forms themselves are conversational, asking one question at a time, with logic and integrations included. Customisation has no ceiling for anyone willing to self-host: custom CSS is there on the hosted plans, and the source is yours to change when it is not enough.

The cost is maturity and reach. The product is younger and thinner than the long-established builders, calculations sit behind a paid tier, there is no save-and-resume, and self-hosting is only cheap if somebody's time to maintain a server is free. The licence removes lock-in; it does not remove work.

Gravity Forms starts from an assumption most of the category avoids: you already run a WordPress site, and the form belongs inside it rather than on somebody else's service.

That produces a plugin rather than a platform. Forms render on your own domain, entries land in your own database, and the licence is annual rather than metered, so collecting ten thousand responses costs exactly what collecting ten does. Logic and question types are where two decades have gone — conditional fields, calculations, file uploads and a save-and-continue link are core rather than optional extras. Customisation goes as far as your stylesheet does: the form renders inside your own theme and accepts custom CSS, so matching it to the page around it is a styling job rather than a product limit.

The cost is everything that assumption excludes. There is no free version, the entry licence covers a single site, and payments, signatures and the more useful connections arrive as add-ons whose availability depends on which tier you bought. You are also responsible for the site underneath it, which is a job in itself.

Fillout treats its free plan as a product rather than a trial, and says it stays free for life once you sign up.

A thousand responses a month is the headline, but the shape underneath matters more: conditional logic, calculations, integrations, CSV export and PDF printing are all available without paying. What happens after submit is unusually complete at every tier, and going over the monthly allowance does not stop a form collecting — you upgrade, buy submissions in bulk, or wait for the quota to reset.

The cost is that presentation is what you buy. The free plan shows a badge, the first paid tier shows lighter branding, and only the third removes it entirely; custom domains and partial submissions are reserved for the top plan. It is also a younger product than most of the field, with a correspondingly shorter record.

Cognito Forms treats a form as the front of a process rather than the end of one, and prices that on scale instead of on capability.

What follows is logic and question types: calculations that run across answers, conditional fields, save-and-resume for anything too long to finish in one sitting, and approval routing are all present on every tier including the free one — the combination an intake, application or registration process actually needs, rather than a contact form with extras.

The cost is in looks and in headcount. Styling control is thin next to design-led builders, the free tier allows a single user and a hundred entries a month with Cognito Forms branding on the page, and the paid plans charge for people as well as for entries, so a small team can reach the second tier before the volume does.

HubSpot Forms exists to fill a CRM, and its ease of building follows directly from that: there is very little to decide, because the destination is already chosen.

A form is built, embedded and live in minutes, and every submission arrives as a contact record with its own history rather than as a row somebody has to reconcile later. Free and premium features sit side by side, and no credit card is required to begin.

The cost is what the free tier is for. It is a way into a CRM whose paid tiers are where the real money is, the form itself is plain next to design-led builders, and there are no calculations and no save-and-resume. If you have no intention of using the CRM, the thing you are being given for free is worth less than it looks.

Formspree does one thing: it receives the submission. You write the form in your own HTML, set its action to an endpoint, and the service validates the data, filters the spam and sends you the result. There is no editor, and that is the product rather than a gap in it.

That shape decides everything else. How the form looks is entirely your stylesheet, so the appearance the product supplies is close to nothing and the appearance you can achieve has no ceiling at all. Customisation is total for the same reason. Logic lives in Form Rules, which route a submission to different addresses, flag it as spam or change where the visitor lands, rather than in branching a respondent sees.

The cost is the audience. Somebody who cannot write a form tag gets nowhere, and the free tier's fifty submissions a month is a testing allowance rather than a working one. What it buys is that nothing about the form is decided for you.

Forminit is the same shape of product as any form backend: your markup posts to its endpoint, and it stores, filters and forwards what arrives. It was called Getform.io until recently and the old address still resolves, which is worth knowing when older write-ups point somewhere that no longer carries the name.

Where it puts its effort is the onward journey. The paid tiers add webhooks to an endpoint you choose, a REST API for pulling submissions programmatically, and direct delivery into Slack, Discord and Google Sheets, with form analytics tracking where a submission came from. That is a fuller answer to what happens after submit than the category usually gives, and it arrives at the first paid step rather than the last.

The cost is that everything visible is still yours to build. How the form looks is your stylesheet and nothing else, so customisation has no ceiling and no starting point either, and any logic a respondent experiences is yours to write. The free plan's hundred submissions a month is an evaluation allowance, and branding removal applies to notification emails, the one surface the product renders itself.

Basin receives submissions from forms you have already built, and its distinguishing decisions are both about limits. Spam does not count against your monthly allowance, which matters more than it sounds when the allowance is the thing you are paying for. And going over the cap does not close the form.

That second decision is the one worth pausing on. A form that hits its limit and closes turns a successful campaign into lost data. Basin keeps delivering instead, and bills the excess by the thousand on a published sliding scale that falls as volume rises. The rate is published in full, and it is the number to read before a campaign rather than after it.

The cost is that nothing visible arrives with it. There is no editor, so how the form looks is whatever your own stylesheet does and customisation is limited only by what you are willing to write. The free plan's fifty submissions a month is for trying it rather than using it.

QuestionScout puts its effort into control. Customisation is where it spends everything: styling is exposed in enough depth that a form can be made to sit inside an existing design rather than beside it, and the upper tier adds custom code and custom domains on top.

The pricing has a shape worth reading carefully. The entry plan is five dollars a month for a single person. The two above it are ten and twenty dollars a month per collaborator, so the cost is decided by how many people edit forms rather than by how many replies arrive. For one person that is inexpensive; for a marketing team of six it is a different calculation entirely, and the headline figure does not show it.

The cost is that there is no free plan at all. A fourteen-day trial on the top tier is the only way in, so evaluating it means committing a card date rather than building something small and leaving it running. Response allowances are generous once you are inside.

Formester covers an unusually wide spread of capability for its price. Conditional logic, calculations, payment collection, file uploads, signatures and letting somebody return to a part-finished form are all present, and the first paid tier is thirteen dollars a month.

The breadth is the point rather than any single standout. Most builders at this price choose a lane — cheap and simple, or capable and expensive — and this one declines to. A free plan sits underneath, and an AI builder generates a first draft of a form from a description, which shortens the blank-page problem that slows a first-time user more than any feature gap does.

The cost is the one that comes with being small. There is far less written about it than about the established names, so a problem at eleven at night is answered by the vendor's own documentation or not at all, and there is no accumulated ecosystem of add-ons or community answers to fall back on. What is documented is documented well; there is simply less of it.

Rebolt is a straightforward no-code builder that keeps its pricing equally straightforward: a free plan, then nineteen dollars a month, then twenty-nine. There is no per-seat multiplication and no ladder of eight tiers to work through, which makes the decision quick in a category where working out the real cost is often the slowest part.

What it covers is broader than the price suggests. Calculations, payment collection, file uploads, signatures, multi-step forms and letting somebody resume a part-finished submission are all present, along with branding removal and a custom domain on the paid tiers. For the ordinary run of business forms that is everything most people reach for.

The cost is depth at the edges. Styling is a theme editor rather than a stylesheet, so a form will get close to a brand without becoming part of the site, and the integration list is shorter than the established builders offer. It is also a smaller product with correspondingly less written about it, so unusual problems are answered by the vendor rather than by an existing thread somebody else already started.