A Jotform alternative with one price and no bloat

One limit to think about instead of five

Metered plans make you an accountant for your own forms: so many forms, so many submissions a month, so much upload space, so many signed documents. The mental overhead is the product's, not yours, and it lands hardest at exactly the wrong moment - when a form is doing well.

Pro is $10 a month and everything is unlimited except the two things that have a physical limit: a file is capped at 20 MB and a response can carry three of them. Those apply on every plan, including Pro, because an upload sits in memory while it's checked and a limit that protects the service has to apply to the people paying for it too.

One request, and nothing to download

Open a published ava42 form and watch the network tab: one HTML document, and that is the whole page. The CSS is inline, the SVG icon is inline, there is no JavaScript bundle, no web font, no analytics beacon and no third-party call. The form is rendered once when you publish it and stored as a complete file, so serving it doesn't touch a database or run a template.

Most hosted form builders ship an application: a script that boots, fetches your form's definition, and then draws it. That works well on a laptop on office wifi. On a phone with two bars - which is where a great many forms are actually filled in - it is the difference between a form and a spinner.

It submits with JavaScript switched off

Every ava42 form is a native <form method=POST>. No script is required to fill it in or send it. Conditional questions, multi-step paging, drag-to-rank and live recall are all enhancements: with JavaScript they work as you'd expect, and without it the conditional fields simply show, the steps stack into one page, ranking becomes numbered dropdowns and the form still submits correctly.

This is not a nostalgia exercise. It is the difference between a response and a lost response for anyone on a corporate network that strips scripts, an old device, a bad connection, or a screen reader that a scripted widget confuses. The server also re-evaluates every conditional rule itself, so the browser is never the authority on which answers count.

File uploads that check what they're given

Every upload is validated twice: the extension has to be on the allowlist, and the file's first bytes have to match the format it claims to be. A .png that is really an executable is refused - which matters because the person who downloads and opens these files is you.

Files are never public. They're downloadable only by signed-in members of your organisation, always as an attachment with a content type we set, so an uploaded HTML or SVG file can't run as a script. Deleting a response deletes its files.

No trackers, so no cookie banner

A published form sets no cookies, loads no third-party script, and we don't log IP addresses or user agents against responses. Our own traffic counting is a per-route tally flushed once a minute - it records that a form was viewed, never which one or by whom.

That has two consequences worth having. Your respondents don't meet a consent dialog before they can answer a question, which is one fewer reason to leave. And if someone asks what you're doing with their data, the answer is short enough to say out loud.

Side by side

Everything in the ava42 column is checkable in about ten seconds with your browser's developer tools. The other column describes how hosted form builders generally work rather than any one product's current feature list, because that changes and a stale table is worse than none.