Great Software, Predatory Business Practices

I purchased a license for Formidable Forms several years ago, and I have been very impressed with the capabilities that Formidable Pro offers. I require a very specific set of features for the data set that I work with, and Formidable Forms ticks all the boxes for me. In particular, the Lookup Fields and Views functionalities are indispensable to me, and in all my research, I find these features to be unmatched by Formidable’s competitors.

Lookup functionality is absolutely essential for my forms, and the Lookup Fields in Formidable are quite versatile. I use Lookup Fields to populate a list of check boxes using data from other forms, and not only do the options allow me to sort the check boxes in the order I want, but I am also able to limit the amount of boxes that the user is able to check. In other form building software that I’ve looked at, I’ve found the Lookup functionality to be a bit scant, and in Gravity Forms you have to purchase a whole separate plugin entirely to enable Lookup Fields at all.

But by far, the most impressive feature that Formidable offers is the Views functionality. The Views feature allows me to visualize the data that I collect in any way I can imagine, which is great for generating pages for the front-end of my website, but it has also been quite handy for creating pages for my back-end, as I can view and manage the data I collect in a much more visual way rather than just relying on the raw list of data that’s presented in the WordPress admin panel. And the more I use the Views feature, the more I am amazed by its versatility. Not only can you do anything you can imagine with HTML and CSS, but there are also countless options for filtering, truncating, and sanitizing the data from the form fields so that you can use them for things like CSS classes, hyperlinks, and image names. All of these options are incredibly powerful, especially considering that many of Formidable’s competitors don’t even offer an option for visualizing your data, and if they do, it is severely limited.

But unfortunately, as is inevitably the case in life, all good things must come to an end.

When I first purchased a license for Formidable Forms, I did a great deal of research to ensure that I would not lose access to any Pro features once my license expired. And indeed, it USED to be the case that once your license expired, the only thing you would lose access to is updates and support, which is perfectly reasonable. But otherwise, your software would continue to function exactly the way it did before the license expired. Unfortunately, Formidable has now made some changes to this policy, such that once your license expires, all of the Pro features are forcefully stripped away from you, and you are stuck using the free version of the software again.

I didn’t realize that this change had been made, so I renewed my license recently after allowing it to lapse for a few months. Now that my new license has just expired, I’ve realized that I’ve lost access to all of the Pro features, including Lookup Fields and Views. That’s right, I’m now stuck on the free version of the software again unless I choose to fork over another ~$100 every year in perpetuity.

This is especially frustrating because I didn’t even really NEED to renew my license. Everything was working perfectly fine on the older version I was running, and I didn’t really need access to support. I only renewed my license because I really liked the software, and I wanted to support its development. Well, look where that got me.

Now I find myself back at square one, where I have to invest my time and energy into 1) looking for an alternative software that will meet my needs, 2) transferring all of my forms and views over to a new system, and 3) doing more research to ensure that the rug won’t be pulled out from under me again once the license expires.

In summary, Formidable Forms has been great for the past several years that I’ve used it, but I really loathe predatory and shady business practices such as those that are now employed by Formidable Forms. Had the current license policies been in place when I was originally searching for form building software, I would never have even considered Formidable Forms as an option. So it’s been great while it lasted, but unfortunately it’s time for me to move on to something else.