The Anvil alternative for teams who run the intake themselves
Anvil is genuinely good at what it is for: a developer’s document platform — fill PDFs, generate documents, collect signatures, and embed the whole flow in your own product through an API. If you are building software and documents are a feature of it, it is a strong choice. Teams come here when nobody is building software: the claims desk, the admissions office or the operations lead configures the intake in the browser, and the documents are one part of the record it produces.
The usual triggers
Three reasons people search for this page
Not adjectives — each one is a difference in mechanism, and each is checkable in behaviour before you commit anything.
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Who runs it
A document API is built for developers embedding document workflows into their own product. Faldaro is built for the team that runs the intake — the claims desk, the admissions office, the operations lead — who configure the form, the rules and the workflow in the browser and change them the day the process changes, with no release in between.
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The PDF, both ways
Drop the PDF you make people send you and it comes back as a working form. Publish it, and the document generated when a record changes state can be a facsimile of that same PDF — its exact layout as the template, filled from the record. The visitor fills a form; the file that lands in the folder is the form your industry already requires.
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After the document
A filled, signed document is where a document platform stops. In Faldaro it is one state of a record that also priced the answers on the server, routed itself, requested its approval by email, took a payment and keeps an audit trail the database refuses to rewrite.
The full category-level comparison — every mechanism, side by side — is on the why Faldaro page.
Switching
The PDF you already have is the whole migration
It becomes the form, then it becomes the document template — and the process around it is configured, not built.
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1 Bring the PDF
Upload the document you fill today and the agent turns it into a working, editable form — a fillable PDF’s own field definitions are read as fields. Or describe the process and it builds one. Nothing publishes until you say so.
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2 Keep the layout
The same PDF becomes the document template: its pages reproduced as the layout, merged values placed where the boxes were, wrapping and growing to fit what a submitter typed. Anything the conversion had to simplify is reported as a note, never dropped in silence.
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3 Open the door
Issue the public link and send it to anyone — no account on their side, never a seat on yours. The first submission arrives as a record: values the server computed, a state to move it through, and the filled document generated the moment its state changes.
Fair questions
Is there an API?
Yes — API keys with an explicit privilege grant on every plan, a versioned evaluate-and-submit API, signed webhooks on every transition, Zapier, and a hosted MCP server so a model can drive the account with exactly the key’s permissions. It is not a document-generation API for your own product; it is the way your systems talk to your intake.
Can Faldaro fill a PDF I upload?
Yes. The facsimile engine turns each page into an editable template that keeps the original layout, and merged values are placed, wrapped and fitted where the boxes were — with the page’s own footer never pushed off the edge. Edges are stated honestly: some PDF features simplify in conversion (gradients, certain transparency effects, glyph-outline text), and every simplification is reported as a conversion note rather than silently changed. Typography comes from a bundled catalogue of faces, never from fonts extracted out of the PDF.
Do you charge per document or per signature?
No. Generated documents and signature requests are not metered. The meters that exist — storage, email sends, AI credits — track our own costs, and the pricing page states each of them. Nothing is ever billed as overage.
What does the free plan include?
Unlimited forms, ten thousand submissions a month, the same logic and calculation engine as every paid plan, public links, PDF documents, email notifications, and payment collection with a three percent platform fee. Paid plans remove the fee and the “Powered by Faldaro” line, and add seats, integrations, e-signatures and more — the pricing page lists exactly what each tier grants.
Run the intake, not the integration
The free plan includes unlimited forms, ten thousand submissions a month, generated PDFs and the same engine as every paid plan.
No card required.