The Cognito Forms alternative for intake that is priced, owned and worked
Cognito Forms is genuinely good at what it is for: capable calculations, repeating sections and tables, entry views, payments and document generation, in a builder that non-developers can drive. If your form collects and calculates and a person reads the result, it may well be the right choice. Teams come here when the calculated figure is a price someone will be held to, and each entry is a piece of work that needs an owner, a state and a deadline.
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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The calculation
Cognito Forms is rightly known for calculations. The question worth asking of any calculating form is where the answer is decided. In Faldaro every formula is re-run on the server on every save, from the declared fields only, and the result is stored apart from what was typed — a browser can display a total, but it can never supply one. The public page never receives the formula text at all.
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The entry becomes work
Once an entry arrives, somebody has to own it. Faldaro makes every submission a record with a workflow state: named, permissioned moves between states, deadlines that fire their own transition, approvals decided from an emailed link with no account, and a status link the submitter can check without asking you.
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The plan ladder
Cognito’s plans step up by monthly entries and by users. Faldaro prices the team and never the audience: no paid plan meters submissions, submitters and approvers are never seats, and partner firms are organizations of their own — share a form with a brokerage and its people work through it on its own account.
How the engine decides a value is in the formulas guide; what happens after submit is on the workflows page; and the category-level comparison is on why Faldaro.
Where the number lives
Two columns, never merged
What a submitter typed and what the server computed are stored separately. The record shows both, and a dispute is settled by reading rather than reconstructing.
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Typed input is cut to the form
Keys the form does not declare are dropped before evaluation, so a crafted request cannot slip in a value that a rule or a workflow guard then trusts.
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Recorded values stay recorded
A reference number is allocated once and never renumbered; a payment status is written by the payment path, not by the submitter — and a transition can wait on either.
Start from a form that already calculates: the expense claim template totals itself on the server and ships with an approval workflow.
Switching
Moving is an afternoon, not a project
The form rebuilds itself from a description or a PDF, your entries arrive as records, and test cases prove the prices before anyone else sees them.
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1 Rebuild the form
Describe it to the AI assistant, or hand it the PDF the process runs on, and it builds an editable draft — fields, logic and calculations together. Nothing publishes until you say so.
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2 Bring the entries
Export your entries as CSV and import them: columns map to your fields by header, workflow states and reference numbers come across, and every imported record is marked as imported in the audit log. Nothing replays — no notifications fire, no integrations trigger.
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3 Pin the numbers
On Team and above, write test cases for the prices that matter — these answers must produce this total — and run them against the draft before every publish. A change that would move a figure somebody pinned down says so before it goes live.
Fair questions
Are Faldaro’s calculations as capable as Cognito’s?
They are deliberately a closed language: arithmetic, comparison and a fixed set of functions — numeric ones, collection functions for checkbox groups, tables and lists, and a blank check — evaluated by the server, never by a script engine. That covers pricing, scoring, totals and eligibility. If a form depends on something outside that set, try it on the free plan before moving; the builder tells you at publish time if an expression will not parse.
Can people outside the company fill forms without an account?
Yes. A public link carries an unguessable token rather than the form id, so the range cannot be walked, and a link that spreads too far is revoked by rotating it. Submitters never need an account, never become seats, and can follow their own record through a status link.
Can partner firms submit through our forms?
Yes — share a form or a whole folder with another organization. Their submissions belong to them and are isolated by row-level security in PostgreSQL, and only you can change the form. Sharing is refused rather than half-honoured at any level the platform cannot enforce.
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.
Let the server keep the numbers
The free plan includes unlimited forms, ten thousand submissions a month and the same engine as every paid plan — and nobody who submits or approves is ever a seat.
No card required.