Intake form software runs from $28 to $250 a month across the four platforms most professional practices actually shortlist, and the headline price tells you almost nothing, because no two of these vendors meter the same unit. Read from each vendor's own pricing source in August 2026: Typeform Basic is $28 a month billed yearly, IntakeQ starts at $29.90, Jotform Bronze is $34 billed yearly, Formstack Forms is $83 billed yearly, and Formstack Suite is $250. Typeform counts responses per month, Jotform counts submissions per month across the account, Formstack counts submissions per form, and IntakeQ charges per practitioner. Four vendors, four different meters. That is why the cheapest looking plan is so often the most expensive one for a given practice.
This guide is the arithmetic, not the marketing. Every figure below was read from the vendor's own published source, each one is dated, and where a vendor does not publish a number we say so rather than guessing.
The Jotform figures were re-read from Jotform's own public plan API on 3 September 2026 and are unchanged from the August reading. Typeform, IntakeQ and Formstack figures are dated in each row below and are not restamped unless they were re-verified.
Which intake form and submission intake automation software offers the best price?
Jotform Bronze at $34 a month billed yearly is the best value for a general practice, because it includes 1,000 submissions a month across 25 forms with no per form cap. If you need HIPAA, IntakeQ at $29.90 is the cheapest compliant option, since Jotform gates HIPAA to its $99 a month Gold tier and Formstack sells compliance as an unpriced add-on.
That is the short answer, and the reason it is not simply "the cheapest one" is that these four vendors meter four different units. A price is only comparable once you convert it to cost per submission at your actual volume. Here is the best choice by situation, which is the comparison most buyers are really trying to make.
| If your situation is | Best priced option | What it costs | Why it wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| General business, moderate volume | Jotform Bronze | $34/mo billed yearly, or $39 monthly | 1,000 submissions a month pooled across 25 forms, 3 users included |
| You need HIPAA on a budget | IntakeQ | From $29.90/mo | The only one of the four with compliance on its entry plan rather than a top tier or an add-on |
| Very low volume, brand-led forms | Typeform Basic | $28/mo billed yearly | Cheapest headline, but only 100 responses a month and 1 user |
| High volume on a few forms | Jotform Silver | $39/mo billed yearly, or $49 monthly | 2,500 submissions a month at roughly $0.016 each, the lowest per submission rate here |
| You need HIPAA plus high volume | Jotform Gold | $99/mo billed yearly, or $129 monthly | 10,000 submissions and HIPAA in one plan, verified on the vendor API 3 September 2026 |
| Many separate low volume forms | Not Formstack | $83/mo paid annually | Formstack meters submissions per form, so the cap that matters is per form rather than pooled |
The trap in that table is the last row, and it catches people regularly. Formstack's 1,000 submissions are counted per form, which sounds more generous than a pooled allowance and behaves very differently. A practice running one busy intake form and twenty quiet ones gets no benefit from the twenty, while the same volume on Jotform or Typeform draws from a single pool. Match the meter to the shape of your form usage before you compare the headline numbers at all.
How much does intake form software cost?
Between $28 and $250 a month for the self-serve plans of the four platforms below, with enterprise tiers quoted privately above that. Here is the full picture, with the meter named alongside the price, because the meter is the part that decides your real bill.
| Plan | Published price | What is included | What the price meters | HIPAA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typeform Basic | $28/mo billed yearly | 100 responses a month, 1 user | Responses a month, account wide | No |
| IntakeQ Forms Only, low volume | $29.90/mo | 10 form submissions a month | Submissions, plus per practitioner | Yes |
| Jotform Bronze | $39/mo, or $408/yr ($34/mo) | 25 forms, 1,000 submissions a month, 3 users | Submissions a month, account wide | No |
| Typeform Plus | $56/mo billed yearly | 1,000 responses a month, 3 users | Responses a month, account wide | No |
| IntakeQ Practice Management | $84.90/mo | Adds booking, portal, payments, telehealth | Per practitioner, $10 to $30 each extra | Yes |
| Formstack Forms | $99/mo, or $83/mo paid annually | 1 builder user, 25 forms, 1,000 submissions per form, 2GB storage | Builder users, form count, submissions per form | Add on, no price published |
| Typeform Business | $91/mo billed yearly | 10,000 responses a month, 5 users | Responses a month, account wide | No |
| Jotform Gold | $129/mo, or $1,188/yr ($99/mo) | 100 forms, 10,000 submissions a month, 100 users | Submissions a month, account wide | Yes |
| Formstack Suite | $299/mo, or $250/mo paid annually | 3 builder users, 100 forms, 5,000 submissions per form, 250 document deliveries, unlimited eSignatures | Builder users, form count, submissions per form | Add on, no price published |
Formstack figures were read from the Formstack pricing page on 29 August 2026. Jotform figures come from Jotform's own public plan data and Typeform's from the structured data on its pricing page, both read on 26 August 2026. IntakeQ figures were read from intakeq.com/pricing the same day. Formstack Salesforce Solutions and Formstack Enterprise are both custom pricing with no figure published.
What does Formstack cost?
Formstack Forms is $99 a month, or $83 a month paid annually, and Formstack Suite is $299 a month, or $250 paid annually, read on 29 August 2026. Forms includes one builder user, 25 forms and 1,000 submissions per form. Suite adds document generation and unlimited eSignatures with three builder users, 100 forms and 5,000 submissions per form. There is a 14 day free trial of Forms that does not ask for a card.
Two details on that price card are worth more than the numbers. The first is that Formstack meters submissions per form rather than per account, which is a meter you will not find at Jotform or Typeform. The second is the row further down the same page asking whether a plan can match HIPAA and compliance requirements: it returns "Add On" against both Forms and Suite, and Formstack publishes no rate for that add on anywhere on the page. HIPAA is described as included only on the Salesforce and Enterprise plans, both of which are quote only. So a practice handling protected health information cannot price a compliant Formstack setup from the website at all. Our Formstack alternative comparison works through what that means against the vendors that do publish a number.
Why the cheapest plan is often the most expensive one
Take a three clinician practice taking 200 new client inquiries a month across two intake forms, and run it through each meter.
On Typeform Basic at $28, 200 responses breaks the 100 response ceiling in the first month, so the real plan is Plus at $56. On Jotform Bronze at $34 billed yearly, 200 submissions sits comfortably inside the 1,000 allowance and three users are included, so $34 is the actual price. On Formstack Forms at $83, the 1,000 submissions per form allowance is nowhere near threatened by 200 inquiries, but the plan includes exactly one builder user, so if two people need to edit intake forms the plan does not fit at any volume. On IntakeQ Practice Management, $84.90 covers one practitioner and the other two cost $10 to $30 each, so the real figure is somewhere between $104.90 and $144.90.
The ranking that comes out of that is not the ranking on the price cards. Jotform is cheapest by a distance, Typeform doubles, Formstack is constrained by a limit that has nothing to do with volume, and IntakeQ costs what it costs because it is the only one in the group including a business associate agreement. Work out which limit your own workload hits first, then price only that limit. Comparing headline figures across four different meters produces a number that is wrong in a direction you cannot predict.
Is Formstack or Jotform cheaper?
Jotform, substantially, at every comparable tier. Jotform Bronze is $34 a month billed yearly against Formstack Forms at $83, and even Jotform Gold at $99 billed yearly undercuts Formstack Forms before you add anything to it. The two are not measuring the same thing, since Formstack allows 1,000 submissions per form while Jotform allows 1,000 a month across the account, so a practice running many forms at low volume each can extract more raw capacity from Formstack. What the Formstack premium actually buys is workflow: document generation, eSignature with no per envelope fees, approval routing and native Salesforce forms. If you do not need those, you are paying for them anyway. The Jotform alternative breakdown covers the same ground from the other side.
Which annual discount is actually worth taking?
This is where the four vendors diverge more than anywhere else, and it is genuinely worth two minutes before you prepay a year.
Formstack states the offer as saving two months on annual plans, and the arithmetic holds uniformly: Forms drops from $99 to $83 and Suite from $299 to $250, which is 16.2 and 16.4 percent. Decide once and the answer applies to both tiers. Jotform is the opposite. Its annual discount runs 12.8 percent on Bronze, 20.4 percent on Silver and 23.3 percent on Gold, so prepaying is rewarded more the more you spend, and the decision genuinely has to be made per tier. Jotform's two year prices, meanwhile, are exactly twice the one year figures on all three tiers, so a second year commitment buys no further discount at all and costs you flexibility. Typeform's toggle defaults to yearly and advertises 30 percent off the monthly rate. One clause that catches nonprofits: Formstack's own pricing FAQ states its nonprofit discount applies to invoices but the annual discount does not, so confirm in writing before budgeting for both.
What about HIPAA?
It splits this market cleanly and it is the single largest cost variable for anyone handling health information. IntakeQ includes a business associate agreement on every plan it sells, starting at $29.90 a month. Jotform gates HIPAA to Gold, so the cheapest compliant Jotform is $129 a month or $99 billed yearly. Typeform has no self-serve HIPAA path at all and should not be used for protected health information. Formstack sells it as an unpriced add on. The awkward truth underneath all of that is that compliance need does not scale with volume: a solo counselor taking twelve clients a month is under the same obligation as a twenty provider clinic taking six hundred, so the plan that fits the caseload is rarely the plan that fits the law. We worked that through in detail in our guide to HIPAA compliant intake form software. If IntakeQ's per practitioner meter is the part that does not fit, our IntakeQ alternatives comparison sets its plans against intake that qualifies the client in a conversation.
The cost that never appears on any price card
Every plan above is priced as data collection, and data collection is the cheap part. What none of these meters capture is the hour someone spends afterwards: reading the submission, working out whether the matter is one you take, calling back to ask the three questions the form did not think to ask, chasing the documents that were supposed to be attached, and finding a time. At a loaded cost of $40 an hour, twenty inquiries a month at thirty minutes each is $400 of staff time sitting behind a $34 form plan. The form is not the expense.
Some of that work is genuinely automatable in pieces. If your intake collects statements, invoices or scanned records, software can extract the data out of those documents instead of having someone key it in. But the qualifying conversation itself is the part that stays manual, because a form cannot ask a follow up when an answer is vague, cannot decline a matter you do not handle, and cannot book a paid appointment off a screening it never ran.
That is the gap Consultations is built for. The AI runs the intake conversation instead of serving a form, asks the follow ups your form could not anticipate, screens the inquiry against the criteria you set, collects and chases the documents, books the paid appointment and hands you a prepped brief. It handles intake, qualification and scheduling only, never regulated professional advice. Consultations is $49, $129 or $299 a month per firm, flat rather than metered by submission, so the price does not move when a busy month doubles your inquiries.
How to choose without regretting it in six months
Start from the limit rather than the price. Count the inquiries you actually take in a month, the number of separate forms you need, and the number of people who must be able to edit them. Then check whether you handle protected health information, because if you do that single answer eliminates two of these four vendors and sets a floor under your budget. Only after those two steps does the price card mean anything.
Then read the meter one more time before you sign. The reason firms outgrow these plans unexpectedly is almost never the price going up. It is a limit they never priced because it was measured in a unit they were not thinking about: form views on Jotform, builder users on Formstack, practitioners on IntakeQ. If you want to see how conversational intake compares with the form-based approach across the whole category, our online intake forms page lays out both models side by side.
That unit question is worth answering before you shortlist rather than after, because it is the one variable that changes your bill by more than any discount you will negotiate. We keep a running comparison of submission intake automation pricing by metering unit, covering which platforms pool submissions across the account, which meter per form, and which bill per seat or per practitioner, with the date each figure was read.
See how Consultations runs intake for your field on the use cases page.