Typeform. $39/mo.
The pitch: the pretty form. One question at a time, your colors, your fonts, the progress bar that makes a survey feel like a conversation. The Free plan gets you unlimited forms, branching logic, custom endings, embedding on your site, spreadsheet export, and an AI chatbot that builds the form for you, all capped at 10 responses a month across every form you own. Basic costs you $39 a month billed monthly, which is $468 a year, or $28 a month billed yearly, which is $336. That buys you 100 responses a month and 1 user. Plus costs you $79 a month, $948 a year, for 1,000 responses, 3 users, removal of Typeform’s branding, and a custom subdomain. Business costs you $129 a month, $1,548 a year, for 10,000 responses, 5 users, drop-off rates, conversion tracking, and live chat support. Growth Flow costs you $379 a month after a 14-day trial that wants your credit card up front. The Contacts and Automations add-on costs you another $25 a month for 2,400 actions, and Typeform won’t sell you that one on Free or Basic at all.
The reality: you are not paying Typeform to collect answers. You’re paying for the meter. Basic’s 100 responses a month works out to about three a day. One decent week of a Facebook ad and you’ve spent the month’s allowance by Thursday. One email to a list of 800 customers and it’s gone before lunch. Then the two things most owners actually upgrade for, a second seat and getting Typeform’s name off your own form, sit on the $79 plan, not the $39 one. So the real price of a branded form with someone else helping you run it is $948 a year, and you’re still capped at 1,000 answers.
Google Forms takes those responses for free with any Google account, with no monthly response cap to buy your way past and every submission landing in a Google Sheet you already own. What Google Forms won’t do is the part that decides whether the form makes you money, which is what you ask, in what order, and what happens in the ten minutes after somebody hits submit. Claude does that. At Sonnet 5’s published $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, 100 leads a month, each one read against your qualifying rules at roughly 2,000 tokens in and 500 back out, scored and answered with a reply drafted in your voice, costs you about 90 cents. Your yearly bill goes from $468 to roughly eleven dollars.
What Typeform still gives you that the free build doesn’t: the form itself, which is the entire product. One question per screen, your brand on it, on a page that doesn’t look like a permission slip. Google Forms is a stack of gray fields. Typeform’s paid-only list is long and some of it earns the money: payment questions and signature questions, reCAPTCHA and invisible bot detection, blocking duplicate responses, automated lead scoring and routing, question-level drop-off analysis on Business, and the integrations a real pipeline runs on, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and the Meta Pixel. File uploads are paid-only at Typeform, and Google Forms charges you for that one in a different currency: switch uploads on and every single respondent has to sign in to a Google account before they can finish, which on a cold lead form is a door closing in your face. If you’re paying for traffic and you need the Meta Pixel firing on the form, or a payment collected inside it, keeping Typeform is the honest call. If you’re emailing a link to warm customers and reading the answers in a spreadsheet, you’re paying $468 a year for a progress bar.
Dropping one Typeform Basic plan pays for the $120 annual Vault subscription close to four times over in year one, and that’s the cheapest plan with the smallest response cap.