Marketing

Stop paying for Typeform

A polished form for the seven questions you actually ask.

Typeform costs US$29–99 / mo, which is US$348–1,188 a year. You have two paths:

Option 1 · Install

Install HeyForm for free

HeyForm is the Typeform-style form, one question at a time, but self-hosted. In the visual editor you build surveys, quizzes, contact or order forms, with conditional logic, themes, custom CSS, Stripe payments, file uploads and signatures. Answers land in a results table with drop-off rates, export to CSV and flow to your tools through webhooks, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, Airtable or Slack. It runs on your own server with Docker: the app, a MongoDB database and a Redis. AGPL-3.0 license, and a hosted version exists from €13 a month. The part that matters: the project went through a big wave of security advisories in 2026 and hardened its code in August. So install the latest version, not an older one.

HeyForm vs Typeform

CriterionHeyFormTypeform
PriceUS$0, plus a small VPS for a few euros a monthUS$29–99 per month
Responses per monthNo cap, it is your database100 on Basic, then you have to upgrade
Where answers liveIn your MongoDB, on your serverOn their servers
Removing the brandingIncluded, with your own CSSPlus plan, from €48 per month
UsersYour team, no extra cost1 seat on Basic
Security and updatesUp to you, and here it mattersHandled by them

How to install it (even from zero)

Three containers (the app, MongoDB, Redis) and an HTTPS proxy in front. The prompt does it all; you bring a server and a domain name. Plan on about twenty minutes.

  1. 1

    Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

    It deploys HeyForm from the official project with Docker Compose, sets the variables, puts an HTTPS proxy in front and checks your first form:

    Install HeyForm on my server (the open source Typeform-style form builder, GitHub repo heyform/heyform) with Docker Compose, following the official documentation docs.heyform.net/open-source/self-hosting. Start from scratch: check that Docker and Docker Compose are present, and install them if not. Create a heyform folder with a docker-compose.yml that runs three services: the heyform/community-edition image with a recent tagged version (at minimum v3.0.2, never older than v3.0.1, the one that contains the security fixes), a MongoDB database and a Redis (KeyDB), each with a volume to keep the data. Generate two long random keys for SESSION_KEY and FORM_ENCRYPTION_KEY, set APP_HOMEPAGE_URL to my domain name over https, and set TRUST_PROXY to 1 since the application will sit behind a proxy. Do not expose port 9157 to the internet: install a reverse proxy (Caddy preferably) that serves my domain over HTTPS with an automatic certificate and forwards to the HeyForm container. Start everything, open the address, create my administrator account, then add APP_DISABLE_REGISTRATION=true and restart to close sign-ups. Check that a first form can be created, published and that a test response comes in. Explain each step simply, I'm a beginner.
    
    Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
  2. 2

    Close sign-ups as soon as you have your account

    Once your account exists, the instance must refuse new accounts, otherwise anyone can sign up on your domain. The prompt takes care of it with the variable made for that. Check by opening the sign-up page in a private window.

  3. 3

    Update, and not in six months

    The project fixed 42 security advisories between May and August 2026. Install version 3.0.2 at minimum, subscribe to the releases on GitHub, and pull the images again with every new version. A public form is an open door into your server.

What you'll use it for

Your contact form, in a story or on your site

A one-question-at-a-time form gets completed more often than a wall of fields. You link it in a story or embed it on your site, and every answer reaches you by email or by webhook into your CRM.

A quote or a complete client file

File uploads, signature, Stripe payment, conditional logic: you collect everything in one go, and the file lands in your database instead of sitting in an inbox.

Surveys and quizzes for your audience

You ask your community what it wants, see where people drop off, and export to CSV. With no response cap, you can do it again at every launch.

Project health

GitHub stars
9,000
Forks
717
Contributors
34
Commits
300
Project age
2.6 years
License
AGPL-3.0

Built with: TypeScript 94.7% · SCSS 4.1% · HTML 0.7%

Public GitHub repository data, captured on October 8, 2026.

Option 2 · Build

Build your own Typeform

Who this is for

This build is aimed at a small business collecting leads or client intake. The goal: create and publish one-question-at-a-time forms that feel excellent on mobile. If you need more than that, keep paying — building it yourself is about owning a tool shaped exactly like your workflow, not re-creating a venture-funded roadmap.

Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Jotform and Youform — they all solve the same core job.

What the prompt builds and what stays out

The prompt below builds a single version with what actually gets used. Everything else is left out on purpose.

What the prompt buildsone-question-at-a-time form, response table, logic jumps, theming, csv export, webhooks
What stays outvisual builder, payment fields, integrations gallery

What a minimal Typeform alternative needs

  • text, email, select, multi-select, rating, and long-answer fields
  • required fields, simple conditional jumps, and a progress display
  • custom intro, thank-you message, colors, and logo
  • response table with search and CSV export
  • email notification and webhook after each submission

Data model

Form, Question, LogicRule, Submission, Answer

Integrations

email, generic webhook

Capability context

Astro, HTMX, D1

The guardrail

Validate and rate-limit submissions server-side; include a honeypot field.

Deliberate non-goals

Do not create a general visual workflow builder or payment fields.

The complete build prompt

Pick your stack, copy the prompt and hand it to your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex…).

You are building a production-ready software product named “Goodform”, a deliberately focused alternative to Typeform. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components.

WORKING AGREEMENT
Before you write any implementation code, put together a short technical plan naming the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, key state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. When something conflicts, side with the narrow audience and the non-goals below. Choose a small, readable architecture over speculative abstraction, but never skip persistence, validation, error handling, or tests.

PRODUCT BRIEF
Primary user: a small business collecting leads or client intake.
Primary outcome: create and publish one-question-at-a-time forms that feel excellent on mobile.
Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Typeform. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation.

END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS
Implement every one of these flows through the real interface and the persistent data layer:
1. The owner creates a form from scratch, adds and reorders questions, marks fields required, previews it, and publishes a stable share URL.
2. A respondent completes the form one question at a time, follows a conditional jump, reviews validation feedback, and sees the custom thank-you screen.
3. The owner receives a notification, reviews the normalized answers, searches submissions, and exports the current result set to CSV.

SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Build these as coherent, responsive views. Each screen must define its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state.
1. Forms list: status, response count, last response time, duplicate, archive, edit, share, and results actions.
2. Builder: ordered question rail, selected-question settings, intro and completion settings, theme controls, logic summary, and live preview.
3. Public responder: one focused question per view, progress, back and next controls, keyboard shortcuts, validation, and autosaved session state.
4. Results: searchable response table, individual response detail, completion summary, CSV export, and webhook-delivery status.

CORE CAPABILITIES
1. text, email, select, multi-select, rating, and long-answer fields
2. required fields, simple conditional jumps, and progress display
3. custom intro, thank-you message, colors, and logo
4. response table with search and CSV export
5. email notification and webhook after submission

DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES
Treat these as product requirements enforced on the server, not as interface suggestions:
1. Published forms use an immutable version so editing questions cannot corrupt the shape or meaning of historical answers.
2. Conditional rules may jump forward or end the form, but must be validated to prevent loops and references to deleted questions.
3. Create at most one submission per submission token and make email and webhook side effects retryable and idempotent.
4. Normalize emails, limit text lengths and upload-free payload size, escape spreadsheet formulas in CSV, and rate-limit public submissions.

DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE
Design a small relational schema centered on Form, Question, LogicRule, Submission, Answer. Before implementing it, document:
1. The purpose of each table, its primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes.
2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, the indexes the named screens need, and transaction boundaries for changes that touch several records.
3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who can trigger each one, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and which audit history must stay immutable.
4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files.
5. The idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where it applies.
Use migrations instead of ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and keep the named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, a disabled button, or a client-side check to protect a business invariant.

USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS
Implement only the roles the stated audience needs. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not just by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide a clear signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed separate users whenever several roles are needed so permissions can be shown and tested.

INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION
The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and trustworthy rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and a consistent place for primary actions. Start from server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must stay understandable if enhancement fails.

Start from server-rendered Astro pages and plain HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must stay understandable if either enhancement layer fails.

Design mobile layouts on purpose instead of just stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to signal state. Destructive actions need a clear scope and a confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent.

Add a footer to every page with the text “Created by aurelioagency.com”, where “aurelioagency.com” is an embedded link to https://www.aurelioagency.com that opens in a new tab. Keep it visible and do not remove it.

TECHNICAL DIRECTION
Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them.

Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules, not in route handlers or UI components. Put persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer plain HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when a failure can be reconciled clearly.

The product brief currently identifies Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface.

Integrate with email and generic webhook. For every integration:
- List the required environment variables in an .env.example with no real secrets.
- Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path.
- Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported.
- Keep credentials on the server, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs.
- Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for every side effect that can be repeated.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Validate and rate-limit submissions server-side; include a honeypot field.
Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any markup you intentionally accept, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect only the personal data the named workflow needs. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces of this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections.

ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS
Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most suitable level:
1. A published form with a required email rejects malformed input, preserves the answer, and focuses the field explanation.
2. A selected answer triggers the configured jump, skips irrelevant required questions, and stores which form version and path were used.
3. A webhook timeout does not lose the submission; it appears as failed delivery and can be retried without duplicating the response.

TESTING
Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and for each external adapter's success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one on a small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run with one documented command.

OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY
Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs, but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable both in the interface and in the logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; never swallow errors silently. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path suited to the stack.

DELIVERABLES
Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a short README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should cover the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state that matters for the product.

DEFINITION OF DONE
The app is done when a new developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey with real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, no core screen is left as a placeholder, and the “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer credit is visible on every page.

NON-GOALS
Do not create a general visual workflow builder or payment fields.

The app you build with this prompt carries a “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer.

Build just one piece

Short prompts that solve the hardest part without building everything.

Logic jumps that can’t loop foreverJump rules as a graph problem: no cycles, no dangling references, no trapped respondents.
Build the validator for conditional logic in a one-question-at-a-time form.

Each rule says: if question X's answer matches a condition, jump to question Y or end the form. Model the form as a directed graph — questions are nodes, jump rules and the default next-question order are edges — and validate on every save: no rule may reference a deleted question, no path may revisit a question (jumps go forward or end, so reject any back-edge), and every question must be reachable or get flagged as orphaned.

The subtle one: a required question that some path legitimately skips is fine, but only if the submission validator knows which path the respondent actually took. Record the traversal, so required means required-on-your-path, not required-globally.

Give the builder honest feedback: name the exact rule creating a cycle, list unreachable questions, and refuse to publish while any rule dangles.

Done when: no publishable form can trap a respondent in a loop, deleting a question surfaces every rule that referenced it, and a skipped required question never blocks a legitimate path's submission.
Edit the form without gaslighting old answersPublished versions are frozen so yesterday’s answers keep meaning what they meant.
Build immutable versioning for published forms, so editing never corrupts historical answers.

Publishing freezes the form: questions, order, options, and logic get copied into a numbered, read-only version. Respondents answer against a specific version, and each submission records which one. The owner keeps editing a working draft; republishing creates version n+1.

The pain this prevents is real: rename the option Sometimes to Rarely and every old answer silently changes meaning; delete a question and old exports lose a column. So answers reference version-scoped question ids, and the results view renders each submission against its own version, showing the exact question text the respondent saw.

Design the cross-version results table deliberately: union columns across versions, mark which versions asked which questions, and keep CSV columns stable by keying them to question lineage — a question carried between versions keeps its lineage id.

Done when: editing and republishing changes nothing about how existing submissions display, mixed-version results never misalign columns, and any answer traces back to the exact wording it answered.
One click, one submission, even on hotel wifiOne token, one row, and side effects that retry without duplicating.
Build submission handling that survives double-clicks, retries, and flaky connections without creating duplicates.

Issue a random submission token when the form loads. The submit endpoint enforces at most one submission per token with a unique constraint, and a retry of the same token returns the original success response instead of an error or a second row.

Then make the side effects behave: the notification email and the webhook fire after the submission commits, from a small outbox table, never inline in the request. Each delivery has its own state (pending, delivered, failed), attempt count, and last error. Retries are safe because the webhook payload carries the submission id so receivers can dedupe, and the email sender checks delivery state before sending.

A webhook timing out must never lose or duplicate the submission. It shows up as a failed delivery with a manual retry control.

Done when: mashing the submit button produces one row, replaying the identical request returns success without inserting, and retrying a failed webhook never re-fires one that already succeeded.
The CSV export that can’t attack a spreadsheetFormula escaping, quoting rules, and a BOM for Excel’s benefit.
Build the CSV export for form responses that opens correctly in Excel and cannot attack it.

The injection defense first: any cell starting with =, +, -, or @ (or a tab or carriage return) gets prefixed with a single quote so spreadsheet apps treat it as text, not a formula. Respondents will absolutely type =HYPERLINK into your feedback box. Assume malice.

Then the format quirks: quote fields containing commas, quotes, or newlines; double embedded quotes; use CRLF row endings; emit a UTF-8 BOM so Excel does not mangle accented names. Long answers keep their internal newlines inside quoted fields.

Columns: one per question in form order, plus submitted-at and submission id. Multi-select answers join with a separator that cannot collide with the delimiter. Stream the output rather than building the whole file in memory, and name it with the form slug and export date.

Done when: a response containing =2+2, a comma, an emoji, and a newline lands in Excel as literal text in a single cell, and a 50,000-row export streams without a memory spike.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Typeform cost if I keep subscribing?

Typeform costs $29–$99 per month on its public paid plans, which is $348–$1188 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.

What stack should I use to build a Typeform alternative?

The build prompt on this page comes in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, HTMX, D1. Go with the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.

What features does a minimal Typeform replacement need?

A useful v1 needs: text, email, select, multi-select, rating, and long-answer fields; required fields, simple conditional jumps, and progress display; custom intro, thank-you message, colors, and logo; response table with search and CSV export; email notification and webhook after submission. Anything beyond that is scope creep until you personally miss it.

What should I deliberately not build?

Do not create a general visual workflow builder or payment fields.

Does this build also replace Jotform and Youform?

Yes. Typeform, Jotform and Youform all solve the same core job — create and publish one-question-at-a-time forms that feel excellent on mobile. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever one you currently pay for.

How is it different from Typeform?

HeyForm does most of what Typeform does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point-by-point comparison is on the page.

Do I own my data?

Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

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