Category: A better form builder

Here’s our review on Apps Mirror. We’re just doing our best to get the word out there that our form builder can do things that other form builders can’t.

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 less 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

Here’s an iframe view of a form that changes the embedded youtube video based on the selected value;

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, no credit card required.

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.

Here’s our first video tutorial;

So you use a form builder. For marketing, for surveys, maybe to build a form for a WordPress site, whatever.

And the form builder you’re using is good… or good enough… or maybe not?

For those of us that use form builders, it can be frustrating. That’s because sometimes your form builder isn’t quite good enough to do what you need it to do.

It says it does conditional logic, but it cant do the kinds of conditions you need. It says it does calculations, but it can’t do multi step operations, or conditional calculations, and there’s no way to control the order of operations.

Even something as simple as lead scoring, so you can figure out the value of each submission, is impossible. It shouldn’t be this painful.

That’s why we built Keenforms – it’s a different kind of form builder, because it has a NO CODE RULES ENGINE.

A RULES ENGINE is a kind of software that lets users create logic or rules, that would normally be written in the code of a program, and lets you save that logic to a database. That means you can create forms that have the dynamic interactions of a custom coded form, but without the hassle of writing code from scratch.

Typically a RULES ENGINE is hard to use, and is only available for large companies with experienced technology professionals. That’s why Keenforms built our RULES ENGINE with a NO CODE interface, so that it’s easy for anyone to use.

Keenforms is built to do the things your form builder can’t do, because it’s been built for professionals who need more from their form builder. If you’ve ever been frustrated by your current form builder, we think you should try out Keenforms. And you can do it for free.

Keenforms – it’s forms made smarter.

We’ve been coding away building out the API as well as an outbound webhooks. We’ve started testing integration with Zapier. Hope within the next couple of weeks to publish it. We’re really excited about it.

We deployed a new feature last night – email notification on submission. It’s pretty easy to set up.

First login to your account, and go to your dashboard.

Next select the keenform you want to set up email notification.

Then scroll down to the section for “After Submit”, and click “Customize Response”

Then toggle the switch for sending email, and submit.

More features are on the way. Thanks for checking us out!

So first the good news – By making the front page on Hacker News and posting on Indie Hackers we had over 1800 page views on the first day of our launch, and over 100 users signed up to try it out. Most of those people created a form. Also received quality feedback, some of which we’ve deployed within 48 hours of launch (we added the for tag for labels to make it easier to read on screen readers for those who are visually impaired).

Next the areas to improve;

While most new sign ups created a form, few created a form rule. The form rules are the biggest differentiator for keenforms. Compared to other form builders there are lots of things we don’t have – easily copied templates, a date picker, a 1-5 star ranking, the ability to upload your logo, multi column layout, etc. Some of those features will be added as time goes on, but this is the MVP.

However while keenforms doesn’t have all the features that the bigger more established form builders have, we do something that no other form builder I’ve seen is capable of – the ability to create dynamic on the fly interactions in a form, with complex conditional, with no code.

Your current form builder may claim it does conditions, but there’s only one form builder that I’m aware of that does anything like conditional calculations. You cannot do compound conditional calculations. No one is doing conditional validations. That is a hard sell though, and many form builder users don’t know that they might want conditional calculations and validations. They just know they can’t do what they want with their current form builder.

There is also a learning curve to using a rules engine. We’re going to need to provide better documentation on how to do the more complex stuff. It might mean a wiki, perhaps videos, and maybe a tutorial.

It’s a work in progress. There’s a long way to go, however I’m really proud of how keenforms is coming along. I hope you will check us out.