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

(www.ikiform.com)
183 points preetsuthar17 | 3 comments | 10 Jul 25 09:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.411s | source

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

1. dev-ns8 ◴[10 Jul 25 15:00 UTC] No.44521865[source]▶
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

replies(2): >>44522470 #>>44522732 #
2. gbalduzzi ◴[10 Jul 25 16:00 UTC] No.44522470[source]▶
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

3. MajimasEyepatch ◴[10 Jul 25 16:25 UTC] No.44522732[source]▶
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.