FormOS
Typeform's feel, on a database you already own — your answers land in your Airtable, not inside somebody else's product.
A form product for people who resent renting their own leads back. The same one-question-at-a-time experience that lifts completion rates, with the responses landing in an Airtable table that belongs to you — so the results dashboard is a tool your team already knows.
- Fill in a real form — My own project intake — built in FormOS, published, in daily use
- Who it's for
- Operators whose leads matter more than their form builder — agencies, coaches, clinics and anyone already running their business out of Airtable.
- Who it isn't for
- Not for teams that need SSO, HIPAA or a dozen shared workspaces. It is deliberately a single-owner tool, and that is why it stayed simple enough to trust.
- What it replaces
- Typeform or Tally — plus the plan tier you're paying for purely to get your own data back out of them.
What it’s like
without it.
Every form product is a mailbox you rent. Your responses live in someone else's database, the export sits behind a plan tier, and the analytics view is one more login your team has to learn and you have to pay for.
The obvious alternative — a plain web form on your own site — throws away the thing that actually lifts completion: one question at a time, keyboard-first, no wall of fields staring back at you.
So the brief was narrow. Keep the runner experience exactly as good, and make the storage something the customer already owns and can open in a spreadsheet-shaped interface on day one.
What’s different the day you start using it.
Your responses are already where you work
Publishing a form creates a real Airtable table with one column per question. The results dashboard is Airtable — your views, your filters, your automations, the interface your team already opens every morning. There is no second product to onboard a new hire into.
Editing a live form can't damage yesterday's data
Columns are only ever added, never renamed, retyped or deleted. The join key between a question and its column is an immutable id, not the wording — so you can rewrite a question, reorder it or delete it and every answer already collected stays exactly where it was. That is the difference between a form you're willing to improve and one you're afraid to touch.
More people finish it
One question per screen, Enter to advance, letter keys to pick an option, auto-advance on single choice, and your place remembered if the tab dies. The format that made Typeform worth paying for, without the bill that comes with it.
The submit actually does something
Owner and respondent emails with answers piped into the subject line, signed webhooks to anywhere you like, hidden UTM capture so you know which ad produced the lead, and per-day view, start and completion counts. The form is the beginning of a workflow rather than the end of one.
Everything in the box.
Every line below is built and running. Nothing here is a roadmap item wearing a tick.
The respondent side
- One question per screen, with enter-only animations and reduced-motion respected
- Keyboard-first: Enter to advance, A/B/C to pick an option, digits for ratings, Y/N for yes-no
- Auto-advance on single-select, and resume where you left off if the tab dies
- Eleven question types — text, long text, email, phone, number, single and multi choice, dropdown, yes-no, rating, date
The builder side
- Autosave gated on validity — while the form is broken nothing saves, and the indicator says exactly what is wrong
- Conditional logic, answer recall piped into later questions, and hidden fields that capture UTM parameters from the link
- Eight India-market templates, and a draft-from-a-sentence AI path
- A share panel with a copy link, a WhatsApp button, a downloadable QR code and both embed snippets
After the submit
- Owner notification and respondent confirmation emails, with answers piped into the subject and body
- HMAC-signed webhooks to anywhere you like
- View, start and complete counters per form per day
- CSV export, and an Open-in-Airtable link to the raw table
Deployed for you — not sold as a seat
FormOS runs as a single-owner deployment on your own Vercel project and your own Airtable base, with your own keys. There is no sign-up page, because there is no multi-tenant version yet: that shape gets built for whoever pays for it first, and it will be built around their requirements rather than guessed at in advance.
- Your Airtable base, your Vercel project, your keys — you can revoke my access and keep running
- No per-response limit and no export tier, because there is no plan to gate them behind
- Set-up and deployment priced per engagement on a call
- Multi-tenant sign-up and billing: deliberately not built
The stack,
without mystique.
Standard, boring technology your next developer will recognise. That’s the point — nothing here is a proprietary runtime you’d be locked into.
- Framework
- Next.js 16.2 App Router, React 19
- Styling
- Tailwind 4, CSS-first config
- Backend
- Airtable REST — the entire data layer
- Database server
- None. No ORM either
- Resend
- Auth
- Single creator — HMAC session cookie, constant-time comparison
- Hosting
- Vercel
What you’re trusting when you use it.
Anyone can list features. These are the calls that decide whether the thing survives contact with real customers and real money — explained without jargon, because you should be able to judge them without being an engineer.
- 01
Each published form owns its own table, and columns are additive forever
Publishing creates an Airtable table with one column per question. Columns are added when you add questions — never renamed, retyped or deleted — because the question's immutable id lives in the column description and is the join key between the form and the data. Renaming a question's wording therefore costs nothing and breaks nothing. This is the rule that makes a live form safe to edit.
- 02
One logic engine, running in three places
The rules that decide which question comes next are a single pure module. It runs in the browser to drive navigation, on the server to re-walk the path when a submission arrives, and under unit tests. Because the server re-walks it, answers to questions the respondent never actually reached are dropped rather than trusted — a hand-edited payload cannot disagree with the path.
- 03
Jumps are forward-only
A form can skip ahead, never back. That makes infinite loops impossible by construction rather than something to detect at run time. It is a smaller feature than the competition offers, and it is precisely why the runner cannot hang on a respondent.
- 04
Serverless freezes the moment it responds
So the email send, the webhook and the counter flush are all awaited before the response goes out, each caught and time-bounded so none of them can fail a submission that was already recorded. Fire-and-forget work on this platform mostly does not happen — that had to shape the design rather than be discovered in production.
- 05
A webhook cannot be pointed at your own network
Webhook URLs are https-only and checked twice — once against literal private ranges when saved, and again by resolving the hostname at send time, so a public name that resolves to an internal address is refused. Redirects are not followed. Every request is signed so the receiver can verify it came from the form.
- 06
Spam handling never tells the spammer
A honeypot field, a too-fast-to-be-human timer, a short-term memory of recent respondents and a per-IP cap all return the same cheerful success screen. Nothing bounces, so there is nothing for a spammer to tune against.
- 11
- question types
- 1
- owner — yours, not a shared tenant
- 0
- per-response limits or export tiers
- 0
- database servers to run
FormOS is feature-complete for a single owner and runs my own intake every day. It has no other deployments yet, and the multi-tenant version does not exist.
Want one of these for your business?
FormOStook the shape it did because of one specific business problem. Tell me yours and I’ll tell you what it would take — and if FormOS is already most of the answer, running on it beats rebuilding it.
Got a project to scope? Start there. Want to watch real software work first? Take the back-end demo — CommunityOS or GrowthOS, you pick.