We've got some big news. Formidable Forms has joined the WPBeginner accelerator. This means that we are partnering with Syed Balkhi, the founder of WPBeginner and cofounder of bunches of other WordPress plugins including OptinMonster, MonsterInsights, WPForms, and more.
Our team is now able to tap into the Awesome Motive network of resources to bring you results faster.
Background Story
Steve and I met Syed at our first Pressnomics, spent a lot of time learning from him later at CaboPress, and have hung out at other WordPress conferences over the past several years.
When the accelerator fund was announced, I was in a burnout. After almost 8 years of running the day-to-day of Formidable, I was losing sight of the reasons why I started. I felt like I was spending tons of time working and getting nowhere.
This was the perfect opportunity to have an experienced advisor. Someone to push me further and expect progress was just what I needed.
So we started discussing a partnership with Syed. Even though he already runs another WordPress form builder plugin, we saw a unique fit since WPForms is for beginners and Formidable is for advanced users. Together our form builder plugins can help everyone.
I am now fired back up and ready for tons of progress over the next year and beyond. There has never been a better time to be part of the Formidable Forms community.
What will happen to the Formidable Forms team?
The awesome Formidable team will continue providing you great support and continual plugin updates. We will also be growing our team and sharing a few Awesome Motive team members. This will allow us to get more done, more quickly and make progress where we need it most.
Interfacing with the Awesome Motive team has already been immensely helpful in bringing about the in-plugin addon downloads released in yesterday's Formidable update.
What's Changing on Formidable Forms?
In the coming weeks, you will likely see a new website design. And we've got lots of plans for the coming year. This partnership will help us reach our goals that have been far on the horizon, so we can bring you the absolute best and most enjoyable way to build advanced forms.
Our main goal with Formidable Forms, is to allow you to create form-based solutions without any code. The upcoming changes in Formidable will help us reach this goal, along with with careful consideration to not sacrifice the current flexibility we all love and depend on.
Are you going to change prices?
If you have an active Formidable Forms subscription, then you will be forever grandfathered into your existing plan.
As we add more features in the future, our prices will most likely be adjusted.
What's Coming Next?
Now that I'm regaining my original passion, adding laser focus, and aligning our team, changes will be coming quickly. We have been working on learning more about our amazing Formidable users in order to bring more of what you love and fix what you don't. We will be working on making every aspect of Formidable enjoyable to use, so you can build amazing solutions without big resources — and build them fast.
To our loyal fans, thank you so much for helping us get and stay motivated, and for being a part of the future of Formidable. We love your kind words and appreciate all the suggestions too.
Steph Wells
Founder of Formidable Forms
That sounds formidable 😉
Well congrats but I have limited knowledge re this partnership and also of WP ecosystem on the whole. WPbeginner has a solid high quality blog on WP, so it can help in better marketing and documentation of FF among others. All the best.
Congrats!!!
Excited to see what comes of this!
Congratulations. I have loved Formidable from the first time I used it years ago and I anticipated a continued love-in. Your support over the years has been wonderful and I wish you all the best in this new partnership!
Love formidable forms, it just keeps getting better. I have been a long time user of the forms for many many years. I think this is a wonderful announcement, and am excited to see what comes next. Congratulations on your partnership!!
I would love to see a whole lot more "views" and "view options" produced - a lot more graphing capabilties, and dashboarding would be great.
Congrats!
Congrats Steph! I completely understand the effects of burnout. Here's hoping this leads to great things!
That is good news.
I noticed a mistake in your text : "I was losing site of the reasons why I started". Maybe sight?
I’ve always been amazed at what you’ve done with your small, but mighty, team. Congratulations!
Congratulations, Steph! I totally LOVE Formidable Forms. An awesome woman web programmer turned me onto it. I also love knowing an awesome woman developed it! Deeply appreciate all the hand-holding getting Constant Contact to work with my client's signup form over the last couple day.
Congratulations and best of wishes on this new partnership!
Very exciting to read this news. Good luck and thank you for making sure we enjoy the best form builder...
Workflow behaviors, please! I mean, congratulations and thanks for not burning out.
Your loyal customers love and gratefully appreciate that you strive to evolve in function and sophistication with the needs and capabilities of customers, rather than put out a single moonshot that ends up dying in orbit.
Thanks Michael,
I'd love to hear more about the workflow behaviors you are looking for. It would be great if you could open a ticket with more detail. Thanks again!
Congratulations! Formidible is an incredible plugin, this looks like a next step, and with passion & laser focus.... Well -> Unstoppable!
Fantastic! Keep on rocking! Remember that you have a community who loves your product. Formidable is the best thing to happen to form building and we don't want to lose that.
I agree with Bobby C 😉
Formidable is the first thing I install on every new site I build. I consider it integral.
I really hope the context of the "partnership" allows you to retain full control of Formidable's vision, it's maintenance, development and customer support, because it's not just the plugin itself that makes Formidable great.
Good luck Steph, Steve and the fantastic FP team. As always, I'll look forward to the evolution of the best WP plugin.
Congratulations!
Just an ask though, but please remember not to break all the existing websites powered by Formidable when these changes come.
All the commentators are right in saying that Formidable is a great plugin.
But the changes in recent times regarding the price of the plugin are not that great. Let me summarize that:
- Recently, you have abolished the renewal discount
Most WP plugins offer such a thing to their loyal customers.
- The lifetime option has been abolished without notice
Did I miss something? The lifetime option is gone. I thought about switching to the lifetime option in the near future. This is no longer possible. Instead, I would have to spend $400 on the Enterprise version every year.
I understand that you have to rely on permanent income for a sustainable business model and good support, but the discontinuation of the lifetime option without a grace period for existing customers is a pity.
Thanks for your feedback Christian. The Enterprise plan still includes lifetime updates, although it has been removed from the pricing page. We will be sending out notices before it is officially removed, just as we sent out notices before the renewal discounts were discontinued. If you would like to discuss this further, can you please open a ticket? Thanks!
Thanks for the clarification, Steph.
Congratulations to you and the team on the partnership! You guys have accomplished a lot for such a small team. Looking forward to the future of Formidable with the additional resources. More features for the Repeater field would be great, like the ability to import repeater entries in CSV.
I was a little bummed when the renewal discount for the Lifetime subscription was suddenly removed. Some more clarification on the new pricing model and its time frame is needed. I felt like we weren't given enough warning about the renewal change and I never got to use it.
Congratulations Steph and team.
Congrats. I am excited about the future. I just sent you a reply to an old ticket with a question, and I would like to find out how to take advantage of this in the future. I want to continue to support. 🙂
Thank you Steph (and team) for all the great work and support in the last years! I´m sure you can really be proud of it and would be amazed of the different solutions worldwide that are based on Formidable.
Jan
That’s fantastic news.
We’ve been using Formidable for the last 5 years on all our sites as it is infinitely configurable.
It’s great to see that this amazing plugin has a clear vision for the future - we can’t wait to see what that future holds!
I have just received an email from yourselves offering me an upgrade to an enterprise account "before the lifetime updates go away for Formidable and our existing add-ons." This is the first I have heard of this happening and am wondering how this is permitted after having bought a lifetime license from you.
Having built sites for customers with formidable in, do I now need to go to them and tell them they have to purchase a license with you directly?
I guess I am disappointed that this is the first I have heard about it and also ethically and legally how this is allowed when I purchased a lifetime license which is a product you offered for sale.
Hi Steve,
Sorry for the misunderstanding! The lifetime updates will of course be grandfathered.
I hear it could be a fine match, Formidable being the advanced version of WPForms.
Also, feeling worried. WPforms has over a million installations... Heard so much lately of personal accounts where smaller companies with years invested - partner with larger companies ... big visions and promise of growth, only to find the larger company to be aggressively self-interested after the deal, forcing the previous owners out of the company they built. What if you are not comfortable after the change, please be sure you have an exit clause in writing?
I Love Formidable, I'd love to see millions of people using it. I enjoy and really need that I can CODE and drag and drop... I want to see its creators happy and refreshed. I'd also be devastated if it turns out into something dumbed-down. Please keep the magic of Formidable, its super smart and sleek...
I guess since I'm on this journey too - I'll get to be a grandfather 🙂
🙂 "Formidable Forms is the most advanced WordPress form builder in the market. It helps you go beyond the basic contact form and build complex form-based solutions like directories, data management systems, calculators, quizzes, WooCommerce product forms, and more.
Now you might be thinking, wait doesn’t WPBeginner already have it’s own WordPress contact form plugin? Yes I still believe that WPForms is the most beginner-friendly WordPress contact form plugin in the market.
But you see, calling Formidable a contact form plugin doesn’t do it justice. It’s really way more advanced than that. It’s a true “solutions-focused” WordPress form builder. Let me give you a few examples to illustrate the point:
You can use Formidable Views feature to display any submitted form data on the front-end of your website to build data-driven web applications like real estate listings, employment listings, event calendars, business directories, job boards, and other searchable databases.
You can use Formidable calculated fields to quickly build calculator forms like mortgage calculator, car payment calculator, BMI calculator, etc.
You can use Formidable WooCommerce integration to create a product configurator form with cascading fields and then automatically send the data to WooCommerce art with variable pricing option.
Basically Formidable Forms is freelancers and developers dream come true for building complex WordPress sites with low overhead."
(WPBeginner Growth Accelerator - https://www.wpbeginner.com/news/introducing-the-first-round-of-wpbeginner-growth-accelerator-companies/)
Hey Carlos, thanks for the comment and for sharing your concern. Just letting you know that We still have full control over Formidable, the roadmap, the marketing, everything. So you don’t need to worry about us losing our commitment to being the most advanced and flexible form builder out there. We have some super exciting things planned that really will make building the same powerful, solution-based Form’s easier and more enjoyable—without compromising flexibility.
I recently switched hosting providers, and the plugin I was using to send email from Formidable to Gmail started having issues. Rather than troubleshoot, I found it easier to switch to WP Mail SMTP, which is made by WPForms.
Now that WPForms and Formidable are part of the same big happy family, it would be nice if WP Mail SMTP could detect that I am a paid user of Formidable Pro, and stop nagging me to buy WPForms. Otherwise, I can't help but wonder if WPBeginner is angling to eventually eliminate Formidable and force everyone to rebuild all their forms in WPForms.
Thanks for pointing this out! We'll get on that.