Honest Pitch

May 15, 2025 · 3 min read

Hey, I'm Tahmid Khan and I'm the founder of Forms.md. Starting today, Forms.md is no longer a subscription-based product. Instead, I'm offering one-time pricing at $99 for single sites, and $299 for unlimited sites. There's also the unlimited free tier as long as the forms are branded. In this write-up, I'll try my best to make an honest pitch for the product.

I'm not a marketing expert (big shocker right there), in fact, I think my marketing skills are fairly horrendous. So, instead of focusing on what I'm bad at, I'll just plainly and honestly state the facts and let everyone decide if this is a product they are interested in.

What is Forms.md?

Forms.md is a developer-first, open source Typeform alternative. It lets you create multi-step forms directly in your application with a few lines of code. The forms look professional, and have good design and UX, mostly because I just copied Typeform's design from start to finish. As an engineer, I tend to be seen as having strong design skills, but really I'm just good at copying things from other places while maintaining a level of polish. Maybe that's what design is? I don't know.

The forms can also be created with a Markdown-like text syntax, similar to Mermaid diagrams if you're familiar with that. So yeah, it's kinda neat.

Why one-time pricing?

Forms.md was previously known as blocks.md, and I started off with one-time pricing. As I added more features and rebranded, I went to subscriptions because I felt like I had to. Everything in tech runs on subscriptions nowadays, so I figured why not this thing too. The truth is, as it stands right now, the product can't justify an ongoing subscription at $25/month.

I'm also a big fan of the Once model, so this is me just trying that out to see if I can build a profitable business on a non-conventional model in the software world.

What happens to existing subscribers?

All existing subscribers will be issued a Pro license for a single site, so they can continue to use the software without paying anything more. I'll also cancel the ongoing subscriptions (obviously) to stop the recurring payments.

Disadvantages vs competitors

Okay, so this is really important. Why wouldn't you use Forms.md? Well, first off, we don't provide a backend to store the form submissions. It's just a form builder that runs on the client using JavaScript. Therefore, you will need to set up your own database/service/whatever to store these responses. We do offer a Google Sheets integration via Apps Scripts that's really handy, because it lets you save those form submissions directly in Google Sheets (including files).

Goes without saying, but because we don't have a backend, we can't really do analytics, fancy charts and graphs, etc. For someone like me, this is a non-issue because I can just write an endpoint for my database in a few minutes, but obviously this can be a deal breaker for a lot of people.

This is also the biggest reason I've decided to pivot to one-time pricing.

Advantages vs competitors

You own everything. That's it really; the software is yours to do as you please. There are also no iframes to embed; as mentioned before, the forms are created within your application or website. The code is also open-source, so you can make changes as needed.

Other than that, it's really just a form builder like all others on the internet. The design is a copy of Typeform, because I really like their design. However, you can also customize everything, including going to a classic form design. Translations and localization are also really easy to handle with Forms.md because of the underlying Markdown-like text (input) to forms (output).

Conclusion

That's the entire pitch. If you want to support the software (plus me and my family), consider trying it out. If you like it, consider getting a Pro license. Thanks for reading!