Holy sh*t, form software is expensive
July 10, 2026
You need a contact form. You search for one. Twenty minutes later you're comparing "Growth" tiers and wondering how collecting a name and an email came to cost more than your hosting, your domain, and your coffee combined.
The going rates
Rounded, as of this writing, for the tiers people actually end up on:
- Typeform — from ~$29/month, and the pretty animations don't answer your email
- Jotform — from ~$34/month once you outgrow the free tier's caps
- SurveyMonkey — from ~$25/month, billed annually, for surveys you're bending into a contact form
- Formspree — solid, but the useful features start around ~$10/month
- Wufoo — yes, it still exists; yes, it still charges ~$16/month
These are fine products. They're also survey suites, logic-jump builders, and analytics dashboards — an SUV you're buying because you need a cup holder.
What a contact form actually needs
- Accept a POST from your HTML
- Drop the spam without harassing real visitors
- Email you the message, reply-to set to the sender
- Keep a copy in case email has a bad day
That's it. That list is not worth $348/year.
The pricing tricks to watch for
The classic moves: a free tier capped so low you hit it the week something goes well; per-form limits so your second project needs a plan; overage that silently drops submissions — you find out when a customer asks why you never replied. That last one should be illegal.
What we charge instead
Free: 50 submissions a month, unlimited forms, the entire spam pipeline, hosted pages, the dashboard. Most personal sites never need more.
Pro: $7/month. 200 submissions, unlimited forms, remove the branding footer. Business: $50/month for 20,000 submissions. No seat pricing, no annual-only discount math — and past 20,000 you talk to a human instead of a pricing grid.
And when you go past your free limit, we don't drop anything — submissions keep getting stored, delivery pauses, and they're waiting in your dashboard when you upgrade. Your messages are not a hostage negotiation; we just think the meter should be honest.