Hello, Formsmith
Formsmith is an open-source, self-hostable, AI-native conversational form builder. The idea is simple: beautiful, one-question-at-a-time forms that run on infrastructure you control, with an AI interviewer that uses your own model and key. Your data never has to leave your servers.
Why build another form tool?
Plenty of form builders are lovely to use. Almost none let you keep the responses on your own infrastructure without a compromise somewhere. Teams that are privacy-bound, regulated, or simply careful end up choosing between a great experience and actually owning their data. Formsmith exists so that is not a trade-off.
What shipped in v0.1.0
The first public release runs on two containers, the web app and Postgres, with docker compose up:
- A keyboard-first builder and an immersive respondent runtime, with 17 block types.
- Conditional logic: visibility rules, jump and branching, calculated fields, scoring, and piping.
- The AI interviewer: adaptive follow-up questions on your own model and key, disclosed to respondents, with a static fallback so a form never breaks when a model is slow or down.
- HMAC-signed webhooks, a REST API with an OpenAPI spec, and full CSV and JSON export.
- Sensible security defaults: server-side re-evaluation of every submission, rate limiting, a submission honeypot, an egress guard on webhook delivery, and security headers.
And no telemetry, ever. A self-hosted instance makes no background calls to us.
What is next
This is a quiet launch on purpose: real usage should set the priorities. File upload arrives as an optional storage profile so the default install stays two containers, and native n8n and Slack notifications are close behind.
This post is also the example that proves the MDX pipeline on this site. New posts are a single
.mdx file, and they pick up the shared prose styling automatically.