Forms and surveys decision
Formbot
A competent technical user can self-host a useful replacement: Typebot and surveyjs provide the core UI/renderer and the missing pieces (LLM extraction, DB, CSV/webhooks) are straightforward to integrate, saving the recurring $19/month while losing some polish and managed support.
Visit website↗Built by John Joubert, who ships 3 products in this index
$19/mo
$228/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off70 h to build
$50/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Formbot alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Accept natural-language input, extract structured fields with an LLM, store submissions, and present results/analytics; expose a shareable public form link and CSV/webhook export.
What it still won’t have
- Polished multi-template gallery and hundreds of ready templates
- Priority support and commercial SLA
- Built-in hosted analytics with UI polish and dedicated UI/UX tweaks
- Hide-branding and managed hosting convenience
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted conversational form service using Typebot (https://github.com/baptisteArno/typebot.io) and a Postgres backend deployed on a single VPS (or small cloud instance). Stack: React/Typebot frontend, Node/Express backend, Postgres DB, OpenAI-compatible LLM for extraction. In scope: (1) install and run Typebot, (2) wire Typebot flows to a backend API that calls an LLM to extract named fields and validate them, (3) persist submissions to Postgres, (4) implement CSV export and webhook delivery with HMAC signatures, (5) admin dashboard to list responses and show simple analytics (counts, completion rate), (6) public share link and embed script, (7) basic auth, custom subdomain, TLS, and error handling. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing dashboard, paid-team collaboration UI, thousands-of-users scale optimization. Include tests for extraction mapping, webhook signing, and API error handling; provide deployment scripts and a README for one-click deploy.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productFormbot - AI-Powered Form Builder
- official pricingPricing | Formbot — AI Form Builder from $19/month
- open sourcebaptisteArno/typebot.io
- open sourceLimeSurvey/LimeSurvey
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
