Most software meters seats. Form builders found a better one: the people who answer you. Typeform's cheapest plan includes 100 responses a month, counted across every form on the account, and when the 101st person submits, the forms go private until the month rolls over or you upgrade. Here is what Typeform and its rivals count, what the counter does at the edge, and which tools in our catalog count nothing at all. Every price and limit was checked on Oct 27, 2026 from the vendor's own page. Typeform, Jotform and Tally show euro prices to a visitor in Europe, where we read them, so those three are in euros here; Fillout, OpnForm and Formbricks price in dollars everywhere.
What Typeform counts
The response base. On Typeform's pricing page, Basic is €25 a month billed yearly, or €35 month to month, and it includes 100 responses a month and 1 user. Plus is €49 billed yearly (€70 monthly) with 1,000 responses and 3 users. Business is €84 billed yearly (€120 monthly) with 10,000 responses and 5 users. The Free plan, according to Typeform's own help article, allows 10 responses a month. Forms, questions and logic are unlimited on every plan. Only the answers are counted.
How the count works. Typeform's Response limits article is specific: limits apply across all forms in the account, they reset monthly on both monthly and yearly plans, and unused responses do not carry over. A deleted response “will still count towards your limit for that month.” At 90% you get a warning, and at 100% your forms “will go into Private mode” until the next month begins or you upgrade.
The auto-upgrade. If you would rather not have forms close, Typeform offers auto-upgrade. Its help article walks through the Basic case: after the 101st response you are moved to a Basic tier with 250 responses, then 500, then 750, and after the 751st you are moved to Plus. The charge is prorated, and the upgraded plan “will stay active in the next billing period(s) by default.” A good month in September becomes a bigger bill in March unless you remember to turn it off.
Response 101
Picture a Basic plan and one form that works: a waitlist, a customer survey, a sign-up for a workshop. It collects 100 answers by the 10th. Without auto-upgrade, every form on the account sits in private mode for twenty days, and anyone who clicks your link sees a notice instead of a form. With auto-upgrade, you keep collecting, pay for the 250 tier, and that tier renews with you. Either way, the thing being charged for is the thing you were hoping would happen.
| Tool | Cheapest paid plan | What it counts | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typeform | €25/mo billed yearly (Basic) | 100 responses a month, 1 user | 10 responses a month |
| Jotform | €34/mo billed yearly (Bronze) | 1,000 submissions a month, 25 forms | 100 submissions a month, 5 forms |
| Tally | €25/mo, or €250 a year (Pro) | Nothing, within fair use | Unlimited forms and submissions |
| Fillout | $15/mo billed yearly (Starter) | 2,000 responses a month, unlimited seats | 1,000 responses a month |
| OpnForm (cloud) | $25/mo billed yearly (Pro) | Nothing | Unlimited forms and submissions |
| Formbricks (cloud) | $74/mo (Pro) | 2,000 responses a month, unlimited seats | 250 responses a month |
Typeform counts answers across every form you own, and deleting one does not give it back. The meter only runs one way.
Jotform meters three things at once: forms, submissions and seats. Silver is €39 a month billed annually for 50 forms and 2,500 submissions, Gold is €99 for 100 forms and 10,000, and every tier below Enterprise is a 1 user individual plan. Fillout goes the other way on seats. Its page leads with “No per-seat charges” and gives even the free plan unlimited seats. Formbricks Cloud's free Hobby tier stops at 250 responses a month.
The catalog puts the famous names in context. Of the 187 form builders live on AppClap today, 133 have a free tier, and the median lowest paid plan among the 116 that list a price is $19 a month. 25 start at $39 or more. 33 are self-hostable, and 18 are flagged open source.
Typeform alternatives that do not count responses
Hosted, with a real free plan. Tally is the clearest case. Its pricing page says “Tally gives you unlimited forms and submissions, completely free, as long as you stay within our fair usage guidelines,” and the €25 a month Pro plan is for removing branding, custom domains and team workspaces, not for more answers. It is made and hosted in the EU. Fillout is not unlimited, but its free plan's 1,000 responses a month is ten times Typeform's paid Basic, with no seat count. OpnForm's hosted service says “Unlimited forms & submissions” on every plan including the free one, and Pro at $25 a month billed annually is mostly for removing the “Made with OpnForm” footer and adding custom domains.
Self-hosted, with no counter at all. OpnForm is an AGPL-3.0 form builder with about 3.9k stars, and v2.6.1 shipped on Oct 22. Its Community Edition runs on your own server with unlimited forms and submissions, and the one limit is 2 users per instance; the Enterprise licence for roles, SSO and white-labelling is $1,999 a year per instance. Formbricks is the big one, about 13.2k stars, with v6.1.1 out on Oct 22 (repo). Its README calls it “The Open Source Qualtrics Alternative,” and its licence page lists unlimited responses, surveys and users in the AGPL-3.0 Community Edition, with one workspace. The paid Enterprise Edition adds SSO, roles, hidden branding and the feedback dashboards.
The rest of the shelf. HeyForm is AGPL-3.0 with about 9.1k stars and released v3.0.5 on Oct 24. LimeSurvey is the old guard, GPL-2.0-or-later with about 3.8k stars and a copyright line that starts in 2003. SurveyJS is an MIT-licensed form library with about 4.9k stars where you bring your own backend; its drag-and-drop Creator is a separate commercial product.
What you give up
Typeform is not charging for nothing. The one-question-at-a-time form it made famous is still the one everyone copies, the logic is good, the integrations run from Slack to Salesforce, and the AI builder, drop-off analysis and live chat on Business are polish an open source project gets to last. The company is based in Barcelona and has raised north of $180 million, including a $135 million Series C in 2022, and some of that money shows up in the product.
Self-hosting moves the counter off your bill and onto your calendar. Formbricks' own docs say the v6 baseline runs eight long-running services, that 4 GB of memory “is a floor, not a comfortable target,” and that a single server means downtime on every upgrade. A form builder also holds whatever people typed into it, which can be names, emails, addresses and signatures, so backups, patches and GDPR requests become your job. Unlimited responses are free. Looking after them is not.
How to read a form builder's pricing page
- What is counted: responses, forms, seats, or all three? Typeform counts responses and seats. Jotform counts submissions, forms and seats. Tally and OpnForm count none of them.
- Across one form or the whole account? Typeform's 100 is for every form you own.
- What happens at 101? Private mode, an auto-upgrade that renews, or nothing. Read the help article, not the plan card.
- Do deleted or test responses count? On Typeform, deleted ones do.
- Annual or monthly, and in which currency? Typeform's Basic is €25 or €35 depending on the toggle, and the page changes currency with your billing address.
What we do about it
AppClap reads pricing pages so you do not have to, we never take vendor money, and when a limit hides in a help article instead of the plan card we go and find it. The Typeform alternatives page lists every option we track, and Typeform and Jotform have their own pages.
Or describe what you need in plain words: a form builder that doesn't cap responses.
Sources: typeform.com, Plans & Pricing (euro prices as shown to a European visitor); Typeform Help Center, Response limits, Auto-upgrade your response limits, Free plan and Upgrade your plan; jotform.com, Pricing; tally.so, Pricing; fillout.com, Plans & Pricing; opnform.com, Pricing; formbricks.com, Pricing, Self-hosting overview and License docs; GitHub repos and releases for OpnForm/OpnForm, formbricks/formbricks, heyform/heyform, LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey and surveyjs/survey-library; tech.eu and CB Insights for Typeform funding; AppClap catalog counts, Oct 27, 2026. All checked Oct 27, 2026.
