Form builders: six vendors, six different things a headline price can mean

Form builders look like the most straightforward category imaginable. Six vendors, three or four tiers each, a monthly price on every card. In practice the figure on the card is a different sort of quantity at every one of them, and a table lining up six headline numbers is lining up six things that are not comparable.

Start with the one that is exactly what it appears to be. Paperform's annual total is precisely twelve times its monthly price on every paid plan, and its page describes it as such — 'billed as' a yearly figure rather than 'save' anything. There is no percentage, no crossed-out number and no claim of a discount, because there is no discount. A vendor charging twelve monthly payments and declining to dress that up is the honest baseline against which the rest of the category can be read.

Tally offers the same arrangement and describes it differently. Its billing switch advertises two months off for paying yearly, and the per-month figure it displays is identical in both states. No annual total is printed anywhere, so there is nothing to check the claim against. The offer exists as a label and not as a number, which is the reason our capture rule is to walk every toggle rather than trust whichever state a page loads in.

Fillout inverts the usual relationship in a way that repays a second look. Its displayed monthly figure multiplied by twelve equals the discounted annual total exactly, on all three plans — so the number on the card is the annual rate, not the monthly one. Beside it sits a struck-through yearly figure, and that figure divides by twelve into clean whole monthly prices which appear nowhere else on the page. The 'before' price is therefore implied rather than published: you are shown what you save from, without being shown the rate it corresponds to.

Formstack publishes something else again, which is a floor. Every figure on its page is a starting-at price, on both billing states, and what varies above that floor is not stated. Its upper plan additionally requires a minimum of three builder users, so the published number is not the price of any configuration you could actually buy — it is the least you could pay if everything above the minimum happened not to apply. We record it as a floor and quote no configuration price, because there is none to quote.

Only two of the six behave the way the category is assumed to. Jotform and Typeform each print a monthly rate and an annual rate, and each discounts genuinely for paying yearly — but by amounts that vary widely between their own tiers. Across their ladders the annual saving runs from under thirteen per cent to nearly twenty-four. Neither advertises a single headline percentage, which is the correct choice when the savings differ that much, and it means the discount has to be computed per tier rather than assumed.

Put together, the category offers a useful lesson about pricing pages generally. A monthly figure can be a rate you pay monthly, an annual rate displayed per month, a floor with no ceiling, or a number attached to a switch that does nothing. None of those is disclosed as such, and the distinction is never visible from the figure alone. The only thing that reliably separates them is whether the page prints two figures you can divide into each other — and in this category two vendors of six do not.

So the procedure is the same one that works everywhere and matters more here than most. Find both figures: the monthly rate and the annual total. Divide one into the other and see whether the result is twelve, less than twelve, or unobtainable. Twelve means no discount, whatever the page says. Less than twelve is a real saving whose size you now know. Unobtainable means the vendor has published a claim without the arithmetic to support it, and that is worth knowing before you commit a year.