A Tally alternative for forms that must never fail

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.

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.

Rendered at publish, not per view

When you save a form, we render it once into a complete HTML file and store that. Serving it is sending bytes - no database read, no template render, nothing to warm up - which also means it caches perfectly at the edge. A form with ten thousand views costs the same as one with ten.

The trade is real and worth knowing: because the file is rendered at publish, an improvement to our renderer doesn't reach forms already saved until they're re-published. We handle that automatically - every page carries a version marker and stale forms are brought up to date - but it's the kind of thing that shapes an architecture, and it's why the load path never touches a database.

One price, and a free tier that isn't a trial

Pro is $10 a month for everything: unlimited forms, unlimited responses, every question type, conditional logic, file uploads, the API, webhooks, email notifications and embedding. There are no tiers, no per-response pricing, no per-seat maths and no feature held back for an enterprise conversation.

The free plan is one form with ten responses. It's small on purpose - small enough to be honest about, rather than a thirty-day countdown - and every template on this site works on it.

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.