matthiasnannt
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
And to be able to maintain the open-source codebase in the long run and finance the work we and other team members & core contributors put into the product, we are developing features beyond the Open Source version that we charge larger businesses for. But this doesn't affect the open source version under AGPLv3, just makes it better because we can pay a team to maintain this.
Another idea would be to let the survey creator know the current length/time to complete the survey, and if it's getting too long, show them advice on how to make it shorter, and show them that they will lose participants otherwise.
The main downside, of course, is that building a commercial product is also harder in the sense that you're competing with your own free product, and it's often hard to find the line between free and paid without losing on both ends.
Also since it can be self-hosted, it can be served from the same domain as the application within the survey. We also see the surveys as part of the application and a necessary part for the maintainers to provide their service.
That's why we've expanded our infrastructure to support in-app surveys, which have become the main part of our application over time.
But there's still a need for an open survey toolbox that's easy to use and allows you to easily send surveys via link or email. Since the infrastructure for these two is almost the same, we are still building this together with our open source community and promised to always keep the link survey features open and free for everyone to celebrate their great work and contributions.
Also this month we organized a hackathon around Formbricks where, thanks to the great support of over 100 contributors, we developed many of the link survey features requested by the community. We also developed features that improve the customizability and overall look of link surveys. For example, video backgrounds is one of them: https://github.com/formbricks/formbricks/pull/1515
We are also currently working with a talented designer who is helping us build a great open design system for Formbricks, making sure that Formbricks surveys have a recognizable look and work consistently across the app #opensourcedesign :-) We will likely be able to launch this within the next 1-2 months
So we built a first MVP as a hobby project and got such a great response from the open source community and early customers that we decided to go all in at the end of last year .
Over time, more and more of our users wanted to survey their users inside their software product and get a much higher conversion rate by asking short and highly targeted questions to better understand their users and improve their product. To help them, we have rebuilt Formbricks from the ground up to support both in-app surveys and link surveys - all open source and easy to self-hosted.
We would love to hear your feedback and see how we can help you better understand your users.