So according to G2 there are 225 form builders. I have not tried every single one, but I did try the top 20 with a free plan. None of them could do what I needed them to do, which was build a form that could produce a quote or estimate for a service or product.
While many form builders have something that you can do a calculation, very few can do conditional calculations. None of them seem capable of giving you control over order of operations. None of them allow you to set the value of an input more than once, so if you needed to apply a discount or an upcharge it's either difficult and labor intensive, or it's impossible. None of them can do dynamic HTML.
Also while there are at least 2 form builders that I know of that can do conditional calculations, it still requires a great deal of work on the part of the admin. It would be incredibly beneficial to be able to create a drop down or select tag or checkboxes that had more than just a one dimensional list of data. If you could create multiple columns for your selectable options, and then use those options values in other columns, that would be a game changer.
So I built my own. It's called Keenforms.
It's a form builder with a built in No Code Rules Engine. The rules engine give you greater control over the order of operations and allows you to set complex conditions to determine if those rules run. It also has a feature called metadata that allows you do create additional values that can be association with your selectable options (drop downs, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc). It makes it possible for users to create the kinds of forms that I as a programmer can build, but without writing code from scratch.
Here are some forms I've built;
-Car loan calculator comparison with different payments based on loan amount and length of loan, from 24 to 84 months
-Inches/Centimeters converter - editing one input will change the other similar to google
-Chipotle Burrito builder with nutritional info like calories/fat/carbs/protein and sticky footer via dynamic HTML and metadata
-Car Make and Model dynamic filtering, i.e. show models of cars based on makes of cars selected
-Mortgage calculator
If you've ever wanted to be able to use a web based form builder, but were disappointed by the limitations, you might want to give Keenforms a try. You can create an account and create up to 5 forms for free.
If you've ever been frustrated with a form builder we'd love to hear about your problems. If Keenforms doesn't have the features you need from a form builder, we'd like to know about it and solve that problem as soon as possible. You can create an account by clicking here.
Really interesting. Some people call this type of marketing "side project marketing" or "engineering as marketing". You might actually get some paying users by advertising your SaaS as an easier way to do these types of marketing.
I'm hoping to try this out this week for my physical business, stickers & digital print production, if I find the time. I thought I was going crazy not being able to find a form builder that could conditionally trigger discounts based on size AND quantity, as 1 discount does not fit all variables. I've got around it by using operators in Wordpress forms but it is not clean, not perfect, overprices in some cases, etc.
PS. I would actually suggest marketing towards digital print & apparel shops. Those were my main physical businesses for the past 8 years and never really saw an easy solution. Most shop owners will not want to go through what I did either hahah so this tool could be their saving grace. Those "500 for $50" type sticker companies on instagram all seem to just use a simple contact/upload/selection form with no math or live quoting involved. Most WANT something like StickerMule has, but they have no idea how to go about it.
All the best of luck!
You can also try www.kalkulio.com. It creates webforms from your excel file. I use it for my printshop www.asaprint.sk. :)
let's talk, I'm highly interested in helping you out. There is a bit of a learning curve, but it sounds like you could be a good candidate to test the limits of Keenforms. And if there is something it can't do for you then maybe its in my interest to add that feature. Do you want to reach out? I can be reached at [email protected]
Looking forward to connecting. Thanks for responding to my post.
"If you've ever been frustrated with a form builder we'd love to hear about your problems."
lol. There's never been a form builder I haven't been frustrated with in my past products.
Especially conditional questions and the other sections that depend on them never work in a way that's intuitive in the back end or good UX or both.
For me, this was one of the things were I noticed how powerful being able to code was, even when I just took my first steps and learned the basics. You really unlock a whole world when you can move away from the basic form builders and make your form what you want to do.
Your forms look great and powerful, with clean UI!
I think that if you can offer these as widgets or code snippets that the user can style, that's going to be a great business.
so you can write custom CSS to style the inputs, there is a learning curve for the app.
Whatever problems you've had I would really like to hear about it. Can I reach out to you?