The SurveyMonkey alternative for when a response is work, not data
SurveyMonkey is a research instrument, and a good one: methodology-grade questions, panels, benchmarks, analysis. If the job is finding out what a population thinks, use it. Teams come here when the job changes shape — when each response is not a data point to aggregate but a piece of work to route, approve, charge for and answer for.
Research vs. operations
Four differences in mechanism
Not adjectives — each one is checkable in behaviour before you commit anything.
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A response is read; a submission is worked
A survey response earns its keep in aggregate — a chart, a cross-tab, a trend line. An operational submission is handled one at a time: someone approves it, chases it, charges for it, answers for it later. In Faldaro each submission is a record with a state machine — moving it is a separate, permissioned act from editing it, every move can notify, generate documents or call your systems, and deadlines escalate by themselves.
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The meter
Response-metered plans make a busy quarter a billing event, and a cap reached mid-collection is a form that stops collecting. Faldaro’s promise is the inverse: submissions are never throttled and never billed by count — the free plan includes ten thousand a month, and no paid plan has a number at all. You pay for seats and capabilities, never for your audience.
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The numbers
A score or a quote computed in the page is whatever number arrived with the submission. Faldaro recomputes every calculated value on the server, on every save and every read — a browser cannot fabricate a total — and published versions are immutable, so old submissions are never reinterpreted by new questions.
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What happens after submit
When a form collects money, files or commitments, the follow-through is the product: server-priced Stripe payments with delivery gated on settlement, generated PDFs, e-signatures requested by a workflow move, and an append-only audit log the database itself refuses to rewrite.
The full category-level comparison — eleven mechanisms, side by side — is on the why Faldaro page.
Switching
Moving is an afternoon, not a project
The form rebuilds itself from a description or a PDF, and your response history arrives as records — not attachments.
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1 Rebuild the form
Describe it to the AI assistant and it builds a working, editable draft — or upload the PDF you were replicating and the agent turns that into one. Logic and calculations are wired in the same conversation, and nothing publishes until you say so.
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2 Bring the history
Export your responses as CSV and import them: columns map to your fields by header, 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 Share the new link
Public links are tokenised, so the form id cannot be guessed or walked — and a link that spreads too far is revoked by rotating it, not by taking the form down.
Fair questions
Does Faldaro do survey analytics?
It has real reporting — saved reports with grouping, aggregation and date buckets, charts, CSV export, and AI-generated insights over a form’s submissions (trends, outliers, correlations). What it does not have is the research apparatus: respondent panels, benchmarks, a question bank built on survey methodology. If statistically defensible survey research is the job, SurveyMonkey is the right tool and we will not pretend otherwise. Faldaro is for when each response is work to be done, not a data point to be aggregated.
Do you meter responses at all?
Submissions are never throttled and never billed by count, on any plan. The free plan includes ten thousand a month and every paid plan is unlimited. The meters that do exist — storage, email sends, AI credits — track our own costs rather than your audience, and the pricing page states every one of them.
Can I import my SurveyMonkey responses?
Yes. Export them as CSV and import the file: columns map to your fields by header, and every imported record is marked as imported in the audit log. The import replays nothing — no notifications, no integrations, no freshly minted reference numbers.
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.
Stop counting responses
The free plan includes unlimited forms, ten thousand submissions a month and the same engine as every paid plan.
No card required.