The form builder that gave away the product and charges for the polish
Tally is a Belgian, bootstrapped form and survey builder with a Notion-style document editor, where the free plan includes unlimited forms, unlimited submissions, conditional logic, calculations, file uploads, signatures, and payment collection, and the paid tiers exist mainly to remove Tally branding and add custom domains, team workspaces, and partial-submission capture.
Overview
Tally inverted the standard form-builder business model. Almost every competitor meters responses: you get 100 or 500 or 1,000 submissions a month free, and the moment a form works you are on a paid plan. Tally's free tier has no submission cap at all, and it does not hold back the features that usually sit behind the paywall either. Conditional logic, calculations, answer piping, hidden fields, file uploads, e-signatures, payment collection through Stripe, password protection, and integrations with Notion, Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, Make, and webhooks are all on the free plan, subject only to published fair-usage guidelines.
The editor is the second thing people notice. Instead of dragging widgets onto a canvas, you type into what feels like a Notion page: hit a slash command, insert a question block, keep typing. That makes form building fast for anyone who already lives in a block editor, and it is why Tally spread through startup and no-code circles first. The company reports powering more than 500,000 teams, with Notion, Make, Buy Me a Coffee, Rakuten, and Glovo named on the homepage.
The company behind it is deliberately tiny: Tally BV, founded in Belgium in 2020 by Marie Martens and Filip Minev after their travel-influencer marketplace died in the pandemic, is bootstrapped, customer-funded, and lists roughly ten people on its about page. Data is hosted in the EU and the product does no cookie tracking, which makes Tally an easy yes for European teams with a privacy checklist. The trade-off for all of this is scope: Tally is a form builder, not a data platform, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Best for
Startups, indie makers, and small marketing teams that need real forms (logic, calculations, payments, file uploads) without a per-response meter, and who are comfortable analyzing responses in Notion, Sheets, or Airtable rather than inside the form tool.
Not the right fit for
- Teams that need in-product or in-app surveys triggered by user behavior; Tally builds standalone and embedded forms only, so behavioral survey targeting belongs to Formbricks or a dedicated product-analytics tool.
- Anyone who needs deep native reporting inside the form tool; Tally's analytics stop at visits, drop-off, and per-question summaries, and even those are thinner on the free plan.
- Organizations with formal vendor-security review requirements; Tally publishes GDPR and EU-hosting commitments but not the SOC 2 report that Fillout and Formbricks advertise.
- Teams that want the form to be a front end for a real database with roles, views, and workflow runs; that is Fillout's territory, not Tally's.
- Anyone whose volume is genuinely industrial; the free plan is unlimited but explicitly governed by fair-usage guidelines rather than a contractual number.
How it works
- 1
You start a form and type. Tally's editor behaves like a document: plain text becomes copy, a slash command inserts an input block (short answer, multiple choice, rating, ranking, file upload, date, signature, payment), and blocks can be arranged into columns or split across pages. There is no separate design mode to learn before the first question exists.
- 2
Logic is configured per block rather than in a separate flow canvas. You set conditions that show, hide, or jump to blocks based on earlier answers, pipe previous answers into later question text, and use the calculator to build scores, quiz results, or line-item pricing. Hidden fields capture URL parameters, which is how most teams pass UTM data or a known email into the submission record.
- 3
Publishing gives you a tally.so link, an inline or popup embed for WordPress, Webflow, or Framer, and on paid plans a custom domain and your own branding. Respondents never see a signup wall, and the forms render in 45-plus languages including right-to-left scripts.
- 4
Submissions land in Tally's own response table and, if you connect them, flow out to a Notion database, a Google Sheet, an Airtable base, Slack, or an arbitrary endpoint via webhook. Most teams treat Tally as the collection layer and do the actual analysis wherever their data already lives, because Tally's built-in reporting is deliberately basic.
Feature breakdown
27 features in 5 modulesEditor and form building
The document-style builder that made Tally spread by word of mouth.- Notion-style block editor
- Forms are written like documents: type text, use a slash command to insert an input block, drag blocks into columns. There is no canvas, palette, or separate preview step to learn first.
- Full block library
- Short and long text, multiple choice, dropdowns, ranking and rating scales, contact fields (name, address, phone, email, link), dates and times, file uploads for images, PDFs, video, and audio, e-signature, and a payment block.
- Single-page or multi-page layouts
- The same form can be a scrolling page or a paged, one-step-at-a-time flow, and pages can be gated by logic so respondents only walk the branch that applies to them.
- Rich content blocks
- Images, video embeds, and YouTube can sit between questions, which is why Tally is often used for landing pages and application forms rather than bare data capture.
- 45-plus languages and RTL
- Interface translations and right-to-left rendering are included on the free plan, not held back as an internationalization upsell.
Logic, calculations, and personalization
The paid-tier features at most competitors, free here.- Conditional logic and branching
- Show, hide, or jump to blocks and pages based on previous answers; available on the free plan with no branch-count limit published.
- Calculator
- Build numeric variables for quiz scores, lead scores, order totals, or estimate pricing, then surface the result to the respondent or route on it.
- Answer piping
- Reference an earlier answer inside later question text or the thank-you page so the form reads as a conversation rather than a questionnaire.
- Hidden fields
- Pass UTM parameters, a user ID, or a known email through the URL and store it on the submission, which is how Tally forms get attributed in a GTM stack.
- Pre-population
- Fields can be pre-filled from URL data so returning or known respondents do not retype what you already have.
- Partial submissions
- Capture answers from people who start but never hit submit. This is one of the genuinely useful features Tally reserves for the Pro plan.
Payments and gating
Commercial forms without a commerce platform.- Stripe checkout block
- Accept one-off payments inside the form on the free plan; combined with the calculator this covers order forms, deposits, and event tickets.
- Password protection
- Lock a form behind a shared password, included free, for internal or invited-audience collection.
- Response limits and closing dates
- Close a form automatically after N submissions or on a date, which is what makes Tally workable for applications, RSVPs, and limited-capacity signups.
- Duplicate submission prevention
- Block repeat entries from the same respondent, included on the free plan.
Branding, distribution, and workspaces
Mostly what the Pro plan is actually for.- Remove Tally branding
- The single most common reason teams upgrade: free forms carry a Tally mark, Pro forms do not.
- Custom domains
- Serve forms from your own domain rather than tally.so, available on Pro and above.
- Custom CSS and advanced theming
- Pro unlocks CSS injection and deeper visual customization on top of the free themes, colors, fonts, logo, and cover image.
- Workspaces, folders, and unlimited collaborators
- Pro adds shared workspaces and folders with unlimited team collaboration, so seat count is not a pricing lever at Tally the way it is at Paperform.
- Custom email domains and notification control
- Pro sends respondent notifications from your domain with customized link previews; the free plan sends self-notifications from Tally.
- Embeds and popups
- Inline, popup, and full-page embeds work on WordPress, Webflow, Framer, and any HTML page, on every plan.
Data, integrations, and governance
Thin by design; Tally expects your data to live somewhere else.- Native integrations
- Notion, Google Sheets, Airtable, Coda, Slack, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, and webhooks, with Zapier, Make, and Pipedream covering the long tail. Google Analytics and Meta Pixel are Pro-tier premium integrations.
- Visit and drop-off analytics
- Form visits, completion, and drop-off by question, with extended historical data on Pro. This is reporting, not analysis.
- Version history
- 30 days of form version history on Pro, extended to 90 days on Business.
- Data retention control
- Business adds configurable retention so submissions are purged on your schedule rather than kept indefinitely.
- Email verification
- Business-tier verification of respondent email addresses, aimed at cutting junk entries on public forms.
- EU hosting and no cookie tracking
- Tally is built and hosted in the EU, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and sets no tracking cookies on respondent-facing forms.
Use cases
4 documentedPre-launch founder collecting waitlist signups
A landing page needs a signup form that captures UTM parameters, pushes to a Notion database, and does not cap at 100 responses if the launch goes well on Product Hunt.
A free Tally form with hidden fields and the Notion integration handles a spike of thousands of signups at zero cost; the only reason to upgrade is removing Tally's branding from the embed.
Community or accelerator program running applications
An application form needs long-form answers, file uploads for decks, conditional questions by track, a scoring calculation, and an automatic close once the cohort fills.
Logic, calculations, file uploads, and the submission-limit close are all free-tier features; the team reviews entries in an Airtable base synced from Tally rather than paying for a review workflow.
Small agency taking client deposits
An intake form should price a project from a few inputs, collect a deposit, and get a signature on scope, without adding a commerce platform.
The calculator prices the job, the Stripe block takes the deposit, and the signature block closes the loop; Pro at 20 euros a month strips the Tally branding so the form looks like the agency's own.
European team with a privacy checklist
Legal will not approve a US-hosted form tool that drops cookies on visitors, and the form needs to sit on the company's own domain.
Tally's EU hosting, cookie-free respondent experience, and Pro-tier custom domain and retention controls clear the review without a procurement cycle.
Pricing
from EUR 20/mo (Pro, billed monthly; yearly billing gives 2 months free)Flat per-workspace subscription with an unlimited free tier; paid plans unlock branding removal, custom domains, workspaces, and governance features rather than higher response quotas. Seats are not charged separately.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | EUR 0 per month |
The most generous free tier in the category alongside Youform, and the reason Tally spread without a sales team. |
| Pro | EUR 20 per month (2 months free on yearly billing) |
Flat rate for the whole workspace, not per seat, which is unusually cheap once more than one person is building forms. |
| Business | EUR 65 per month |
A governance tier. If you do not need retention policy or email verification, there is no reason to leave Pro. |
Billing notes
- Prices are displayed in euros for European visitors; Tally geo-displays currency, so US buyers may see a dollar figure at a similar level.
- Yearly billing on Pro is advertised as two months free; the Business tier's yearly figure is not broken out on the pricing page.
- There is no per-response overage, because there is no response quota on any plan. The stated constraint on the free plan is fair-usage guidelines rather than a number, which is a soft limit buyers should be aware of.
- Collaborators are unlimited on Pro, so a five-person team pays the same as one person. That is the opposite of Paperform's model and matters at small scale.
- The free plan caps individual file uploads at 10 MB; Pro removes that limit.
- Pricing current as of August 2026.
Value assessment: On capability per dollar Tally is close to unbeatable, because for a large share of teams the correct answer is zero dollars. The paid tier is honest about what it sells: branding, domain, team workspaces, and partial submissions, not access to features you already needed. At 20 euros a month flat for unlimited collaborators and unlimited responses, Pro undercuts Fillout's Business tier by a factor of three and Paperform's Pro tier by more than half, and it does so without a submission meter running in the background. The catch is scope, not price: if you need in-app surveys, a real database behind the form, or a SOC 2 report, the cheapness is irrelevant because Tally does not do those things.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Genuinely unlimited free tier: unlimited forms and submissions with logic, calculations, payments, file uploads, and signatures included, not withheld as paid bait.
- The document-style editor is the fastest way to build a form of any tool in this category, especially for teams already fluent in Notion.
- Flat workspace pricing with unlimited collaborators, so team growth does not create a bill the way per-seat tools do.
- EU-built and EU-hosted with no respondent cookie tracking, which clears European privacy reviews without a negotiation.
- Bootstrapped, profitable, and customer-funded, with no investor pressure to re-meter the free plan; the about page states the position explicitly.
- Native Notion, Airtable, Coda, and Google Sheets integrations mean submissions land where small teams already work.
Limitations
- Analytics are minimal: visits, completion, and drop-off, with the useful historical depth reserved for Pro. Serious response analysis happens elsewhere.
- No in-app or website-behavior survey targeting at all, so product teams wanting NPS or in-product feedback need a second tool.
- The free plan's limits are governed by fair-usage language rather than a published number, which is fine for most teams and unnerving for anyone planning very high volume.
- Compliance posture is thinner than rivals: GDPR and EU hosting are documented, but there is no advertised SOC 2 Type II certification of the kind Fillout and Formbricks publish.
- Ten-person team means slower feature velocity than venture-funded competitors, and support is documentation-and-email rather than staffed around the clock.
- No native database, table, or record-management layer; a form that needs to read and write against structured data pushes you toward Fillout.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesTally vs Youform
from $29/mo (Pro, billed monthly; $20/mo equivalent at $240/yr annually)These are the two unlimited-free form builders, and the differences are small but real. Tally has the better editor, the deeper integration set (Notion, Airtable, Coda), workspaces with unlimited collaborators on a 20-euro plan, and EU hosting; Youform has a more conversational one-question-at-a-time feel, 300-plus themes, and phone verification, but caps teams at 3 members on Pro and 5 on Business. Pick Tally if the form is a document your team edits together, Youform if you want a Typeform-shaped experience for free.
Full Tally vs Youform comparisonTally vs Fillout
from $15/mo (Starter, billed monthly; $180/yr annually)Fillout is the more capable product and Tally is the better deal. Fillout gives you 50-plus native integrations, database-backed workflows, scheduling, SOC 2 Type II, and an enterprise path, but it meters responses at 1,000 a month free and 5,000 on the 40-dollar Pro plan. Tally never counts responses and charges a flat 20 euros for the whole workspace. Choose Fillout when the form is the front end of an operational process; choose Tally when the form is just a form.
Full Tally vs Fillout comparisonTally vs Paperform
from $24/mo (Essentials, billed monthly; $288/yr)Paperform is the design-led option with 30,000-plus templates, a mature payments and booking story, and Papersign for real e-signature workflows, but its free plan stops at 30 submissions a month and its paid tiers meter submissions annually and charge per user above three. Tally gives away most of what Paperform's Essentials tier sells. Go Paperform if you are selling products or services through the form and need the commerce and document depth; go Tally if the priority is cost and speed.
Full Tally vs Paperform comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Minutes. A working form with logic and an integration is a 15-minute job, and there is no account requirement for respondents, no domain setup, and no data model to design first.
- Learning curve
- The lowest in the category for anyone who has used Notion. The only non-obvious parts are the calculator (variables are configured per block) and hidden fields, both of which the help docs cover in a page each.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self-serve: sign up, build, publish. No sales call exists even at the Business tier, and there is no paid implementation offering.
- Migration notes
- No one-click importer from Typeform or Google Forms is advertised, so migration usually means rebuilding forms by hand, which is fast given the editor. Historical submissions have to be exported from the old tool and kept separately, since Tally will not backfill them into a new form's response table.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web appEmbeds (inline, popup, full page)Custom domains on paid tiers
- API
- No general-purpose public REST API is advertised on the marketing site; programmatic access is via webhooks on submission plus Zapier, Make, and Pipedream connectors.
- Compliance
- GDPR compliant, built and hosted in the EU (Belgium-based company)Data encrypted in transit and at restNo cookie tracking on respondent-facing forms
- Data residency
- EU hosting stated on the marketing site.
- SSO
- Not advertised on any published tier.
- Security notes
- Password protection, duplicate-submission prevention, and Business-tier email verification and data-retention controls cover the common needs. Teams that require a SOC 2 report or SAML SSO for vendor approval will not find them published here.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportHelp centerPublic roadmap and changelog
- Documentation
- A practical help center covering blocks, logic, calculations, integrations, and embedding, written for non-technical users rather than developers.
- Community
- Strong presence in no-code, indie-maker, and startup communities; Tally's growth has been largely word of mouth rather than paid acquisition.
Company
- Founded
- 2020
- Headquarters
- Belgium (Tally BV, EU-hosted)
- Ownership
- Bootstrapped
- Founders
- Marie Martens, Filip Minev
- Employees
- Roughly 10 (team members listed on the company about page, 2026)
- Funding
- No outside investment. The company describes itself as bootstrapped and customer-funded, and public founder interviews have tracked its growth past the multi-million ARR mark.
Timeline
- 2020Marie Martens and Filip Minev pivot from a pandemic-hit hotel and travel-influencer marketplace and launch Tally as a free, document-style form builder.
- 2021The unlimited free plan and Notion-native integration drive word-of-mouth adoption through no-code and indie-maker communities.
- 2022Founder interviews report tens of thousands of customers and a first ARR milestone, still with a team of a handful of people and no outside funding.
- 2024Tally scales past the multi-million ARR mark while keeping the free tier uncapped, and the paid plan stays a flat workspace fee rather than a per-seat charge.
- 2026Homepage claims 500,000-plus teams including Notion, Make, Buy Me a Coffee, Rakuten, and Glovo; the Business tier adds data retention control and email verification.
Integrations
- Notion
- Google Sheets
- Airtable
- Coda
- Slack
- Stripe (payment block)
- Google Analytics (Pro)
- Meta Pixel (Pro)
- Webhooks
- Zapier
- Make
- Pipedream
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Tally?
Tally is a form and survey builder from Belgium with a Notion-style document editor, best known for a free plan that includes unlimited forms and unlimited submissions. It covers conditional logic, calculations, file uploads, signatures, and Stripe payments without charging for them.
Is Tally really free and unlimited?
Yes on both forms and submissions. There is no response quota on any plan, including the free one, and the advanced features most competitors paywall (logic, calculations, payments, file uploads, signatures) are included. The stated constraint is fair-usage guidelines rather than a hard number, and free-plan file uploads are capped at 10 MB per file.
What does Tally Pro actually add?
Removal of Tally branding, custom domains, unlimited team collaboration with workspaces and folders, partial-submission capture, drop-off analytics, custom CSS, custom email sending domains, and 30 days of version history. It does not raise any response limit, because none exists.
How much does Tally cost?
Pro is 20 euros per month billed monthly, with two months free on yearly billing, and Business is 65 euros per month. Both are flat workspace prices with unlimited collaborators, not per-seat charges. Prices are geo-displayed, so US visitors may see a dollar figure at a comparable level.
Can Tally collect payments?
Yes, through a Stripe checkout block that works on the free plan. Combined with the calculator field you can price a form dynamically and take a one-off payment or deposit, which covers order forms, event tickets, and agency retainers.
Is Tally GDPR compliant?
Tally states GDPR compliance, is built and hosted in the EU, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and sets no tracking cookies on respondent-facing forms. Business adds configurable data retention. It does not publish a SOC 2 Type II certification, so teams whose procurement requires one should look at Fillout or Formbricks.
Does Tally have an API?
Not a general-purpose public REST API on the marketing site. Programmatic use runs through submission webhooks plus Zapier, Make, and Pipedream, which covers most automation needs but is a real constraint for developers who want to create or read forms from code.
Tally or Typeform?
Typeform is the category's design benchmark and has a deeper analytics and enterprise story, but it prices by response and gets expensive fast. Tally offers a comparable conversational form experience with unlimited responses for free and a flat 20-euro paid plan, which is why a steady stream of startups migrate in that direction.
Who founded Tally and is it profitable?
Marie Martens and Filip Minev founded Tally in Belgium in 2020, pivoting from a travel-influencer marketplace that the pandemic killed. The company is bootstrapped and customer-funded with a team of about ten, and founder interviews have documented its growth past multi-million ARR without outside investment.
What is Tally not good at?
In-product and behavior-triggered surveys, deep response analytics, and anything that needs a real database behind the form. Tally is a collection layer that expects the analysis to happen in Notion, Airtable, or a warehouse, and product teams wanting in-app NPS should pair it with Formbricks or replace it with Fillout.
Editorial verdict
Tally is the default recommendation for any startup that needs forms and has not already committed to something else. The free tier is not a trial in disguise: unlimited submissions with logic, calculations, payments, and file uploads included is a real product, and the 20-euro Pro plan buys branding, a domain, and a shared workspace rather than access to features you were already using. The limits are honest ones: no in-app survey targeting, thin analytics, no public API, and no SOC 2 report. If your form is a front end for an operational process, buy Fillout; if your survey has to fire inside your product, buy Formbricks. For everything else, Tally is the tool you should try first and will probably never leave.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.
Awards & badges
1 heldTally holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.
Best Value · Forms & Surveys
“Gave away the whole form builder and charges only for the polish, resetting what free means in this category.”
<a href="https://saastracker.org/products/tally"><img src="https://saastracker.org/badges/embed/tally/best-value-summer-2026.svg" width="180" height="180" alt="Tally: Best Value, Forms & Surveys. SaaSTracker Summer 2026 Awards." /></a>
