Build a real survey for free - and keep every answer.
Set it up once and every response lands sorted, private, and ready to act on. Make it yours in minutes - no spreadsheets held together with hope.
- Who it’s for
- Founders, students, researchers, and teams
- How it flows
- You publish a link → people respond → answers are yours, stored in the EU → export anytime
Fewer dropped balls. More “done.”
The boring parts - sorting, filtering, routing, and keeping data tidy - happen on their own.
Every reply in one place
No more answers scattered across inboxes and tabs. Each response lands in a shared, organized stream your whole team can act on.
Spam stays out, files stay private
Junk is filtered automatically, and any uploads arrive with the limits you set - never as forever-links floating around email.
Goes where your team works
Send each answer to a chat ping, a spreadsheet row, or your contacts - automatically, the moment someone hits submit.
Everyone knows who’s got it
Each response has an owner and a status, so nobody asks “wait, did someone reply to this?” ever again.
Most "free" survey tools are free until the part you need - they cap responses, hide the results behind an upgrade, or paywall exporting your own data. Formspring's free tier is deliberately honest: you can build a genuine survey, share it, collect responses, and read and export them without hitting a wall on the answers you already collected.
The builder is the same one that powers the paid surveys, so "free" does not mean "toy." You get multiple question types, a clean multi-screen experience that works on mobile (where most respondents are), a progress indicator, and a hosted link you can drop into an email, a social post, or a QR code. Branching is included, so the survey can skip irrelevant blocks and feel written for each respondent rather than interrogating everyone with every question.
What sets it apart from free survey makers is data ownership. Responses are stored in EU data centres in Germany and Finland, searchable and exportable to CSV or JSON - they are yours, not a sample you can glimpse until you pay. That matters whether you are a student running a research survey, a founder validating an idea, or a team taking a quick internal pulse.
The free tier is real, and the upgrade path is honest about where it starts: NPS, CSAT, and CES question types, quotas, resume links for longer surveys, and AI analysis of open-text answers unlock on the Pro plan ($19/mo). Start free, with no credit card, and move up only when you need the heavier machinery.
A real survey, free - not a teaser
The free tier uses the same builder as the paid product: multiple question types, a single-question-per-screen mobile experience, a progress bar, and a hosted link to share anywhere. You can write unbiased questions, keep scales consistent, and ration open questions - the fundamentals of a survey that produces decisions rather than noise. The question-design guide walks through writing questions people answer honestly, and the surveys pillar guide covers the whole craft.
Branching included, even on free
Logic is what separates a questionnaire from an interrogation, and it is not paywalled. Skip logic jumps respondents past irrelevant blocks, so someone who did not contact support never sees five questions about support quality. That keeps your data clean - fabricated answers from forced questions are worse than missing ones - and keeps respondents engaged. Conditional logic in surveys without writing code shows the patterns worth using from the start.
Your responses, owned and exportable
Free survey makers often treat your responses as the product - capped, sampled, or locked behind an upgrade. Formspring stores responses in the EU (Germany and Finland), keeps them searchable, and lets you export to CSV or JSON whenever you want. The data is yours to analyse in your own tools, share with collaborators, or pipe to a spreadsheet over an integration. EU residency also makes it a sound default for research and customer surveys involving European respondents.
When to upgrade from free
The free tier covers honest survey-making; the heavier machinery starts on Pro ($19/mo). That is where NPS, CSAT, and CES become first-class question types with scoring, where quotas cap responses per segment to protect sample balance, where resume links let respondents finish longer surveys later, and where AI insights cluster open-text answers into themes. If you are running a one-off survey, free is genuinely enough; upgrade when you are running an ongoing program. The response-rates playbook helps either way.