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Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

by dearroy on 4/1/24, 4:30 PM with 122 comments

• by jraph on 4/1/24, 7:03 PM

  I'm secretly and slowly building a form building application. The idea is that in my association we don't want to rely on Google Forms. And we only want to use open source software. We are using FramaForms which is a bit clunky and doesn't have this feature that updates a spreadsheet automatically. I thought that I could just create something that would answer both concerns.

  But a good open source forms app would probably change everything, I would gladly stop my small project (in favor of contributing to an existing one for instance). I see there is integration with a lot of products, including Google Drive and Google Sheet.

  Would an integration with Nextcloud be considered?

  Congratulations on open sourcing this, we need open source and self hosted form solutions. Critically private data is put in forms and that get sent to big private companies like Google, which is not ideal.

  As other commenters say, you might want to use AGPL indeed, but I guess you carefully thought this decision.

• by snapcaster on 4/1/24, 5:40 PM

  How did you think about the tradeoffs between closed-source profitable vs. open sourcing it? What do you see as your criteria for success on this move?

• by Syntaf on 4/2/24, 12:13 AM

  Very cool! Form builders are really fun applications to build and teach you a lot about more advanced relational models (like polymorphic relations)

  I scrapped together a form-builder-with-payments using RoR and RailsAdmin last year for my club and ended up spinning it off into a pay-per-use SaaS[1].

  As it turns out, forms are a fundamental aspect of a LOT of things, and offering free use tools can change the game for clubs or organizations looking to keep their data in one place.

  [1] https://embolt.app

• by rkuodys on 4/2/24, 6:08 AM

  I cannot quickly find the answer so maybe the project owner can share - I have a need for which apparently there is no ready-to-use product - I need to have form which is anonymous, but at the same time it should be one-time-only submit. (Like voting system).

  My ideal solution would be to send unique link to each recipient and limit one submission per link. However, I as a purchaser should not be able to see who got which link, or at least, how each link voted.

  Question if heyform has some implementation of the need already, because none of the well known products - Google forms, MS Forms, Typeform - support anything like that

• by la64710 on 4/1/24, 7:45 PM

  What is the reason for “open sourcing” this , when any meaningful implementation is locked away behind services and is closed source. I just think these kind of use cases confuses users. There is no problem in being closed source and proprietary (unless you are using preexisting open source code and open sourcing those parts of your code makes it legally compliant) . In any case it is confusing at best and misleading at the worst.

• by izwasm on 4/1/24, 7:00 PM

  I really like that you are using nestjs, idk why some devs hate it, IMHO its the best node framework that can be used to build production ready apps, i started using it a month ago at work and it was my first time using it, and it already made so productive

• by quantumwoke on 4/1/24, 5:39 PM

  Can anyone confirm if the legal advice here https://docs.heyform.net/license is correct? Seems slightly different to my own interpretation of the spirit of GPL.

• by thih9 on 4/1/24, 6:32 PM

  Congrats on open sourcing your project!

  I see that it relies on mongodb, at a first glance this seems a good fit for a forms oriented product - looks like using a document db for actually dealing with documents. How did it work out for you? Would you choose it again?

• by snvzz on 4/2/24, 6:22 AM

  Huge Affero (AGPL) warning.

  Do not touch unless you understand how the license works and want to do so anyway.

• by tomfreemax on 4/2/24, 8:35 AM

  Looks really cool and could be a good alternative to Typeform.

  In our organization, due to privacy reasons we need to self host.

  You might want to look at something like the plus plan photoprism has. For photoprism, if you want a UI for user admin, you pay something. One can do the same thing from cli, but in corporate environments it's easier for me to say, look, we need to pay, because we need this admin interface. If I would self host but want to support you otherwise, it's hard to argue why the organization should "donate" money.

  Hope it makes sense. Best wishes!

• by V__ on 4/1/24, 8:33 PM

  This looks really nice. I assume you have looked at the alternatives and created heyform with a special feature or use case in mind? If so, could you summarize the differences between heyform and for example: getinput.co, quillforms.com or snoopforms.com?

• by not_your_vase on 4/1/24, 4:56 PM

  What's your rationale behind this step?

• by jdaviescoates on 4/2/24, 8:50 AM

  I currently use NocoDB for forms, which works great, but this looks great too, many thanks for sharing!

• by tamimio on 4/1/24, 7:21 PM

  Your website doesn’t open, it seems it’s flagged in one of the DNS popular blacklists

• by saasxyz on 4/3/24, 8:31 AM

  This is cool. Are you an open startup by any chance? if yes, I would love to check out that page to learn more about your operation costs and revenue.

• by sfink on 4/1/24, 8:29 PM

  I've often wanted a simple online form solution for random purposes, yet I have never quite gotten around to learning Google Forms. My kids use it for school stuff. They're reasonably capable with it and have gotten good mileage from it. I guess at some level it's hard for me to get into something that often requires flexibility, yet can't be modified beyond rigidly prescribed boundaries.

  I would totally rather learn something like this that I can hack on. And when other people ask me how to do something for a Real reason, I would not hesitate to recommend the hosted version if it can do what they want. (No, I don't want to be on the hook for maintaining a self-hosted version of something that will be depended on for wide public consumption. I'm done with pager duty.)

  The creators' hearts seem to be in the right place, so I'm less subliminally worried that they'll enshittify it in some way that bothers me. And if they do, the license gives me a way to proceed without starting with something new from scratch.

• by whitefang on 4/2/24, 6:31 PM

  This is neat.

  I'm building Formester and it is a lot of work to keep up a good form builder.

  Wish you all the best.

• by stuckkeys on 4/3/24, 6:42 PM

  @dearroy what chat support service do you use? I always find them useful.

• by luanxr2000 on 4/3/24, 7:34 AM

  Good job for the open source survey form app!

• by youngbum on 4/2/24, 1:31 PM

  Cool

• by circusfly on 4/1/24, 9:39 PM

  AI thanks you for your efforts.

• by orliesaurus on 4/1/24, 6:13 PM

  do you consider this a marketing move?

• by bberenberg on 4/1/24, 6:18 PM

  Considering that this is SaaS, are you sure GPL is sufficient here? Did you consider AGPL?