For SaaS & software startups
Half of your demo calls should have been an email.
Formala answers the pre-sales questions right on your pricing page, then offers the calendar only when the answers say a call is worth having.
30-day trial, no card. One line of script on the site you already have.
- Answers in your product's words
- Declines rather than guesses
- Logs every gap it couldn't answer
- Need
- SAML SSO, Okta
- Team size
- About 40
- Replacing
- Spreadsheet and Slack
- lena@northwind.example
A scripted example, not a real inquiry.
The conversation on the screen in this photograph is scripted too.
The cost of a full calendar
Four of these were worth having.
One week of a founder's demo calendar. Each call is thirty minutes, plus the context switch either side of it.
Mon
- Student, thesis
- Northwind · 40 seats
- “Just looking”
Tue
- Competitor
- Wanted the API doc
Wed
- Loomis · replacing Zendesk
- 5-person team
- Pricing question
Thu
- No-show
- Aperture · security review
Fri
- Wanted SSO, we have it
- Bell Yard · 120 seats
01
The demo calendar fills with the wrong people
Students, competitors, and companies a tenth of the size you sell to. Each one costs a founder half an hour, plus the context switch either side of it.
02
The blocker is one question deep
Do you have SSO. Is there an API. Where is the data hosted. Do you do annual billing. They will not book a call to find out, and they will not email either.
03
Nobody is awake in their timezone
Your best inbound arrives while the team is asleep, reads a contact form, and goes to look at whoever is answering.
What Formala does about it
It answers, it qualifies, then it tells you what it couldn't do.
One thing happening in order, not three features. The third is the one that compounds.
Answers the pre-sales questions
Integrations, security posture, limits, what's on which plan. It answers from what you've told it and nothing else, so a roadmap date you haven't given it is a date it will not invent.
Qualifies before it offers a call
Team size, what they're replacing, what timeline they're on. The calendar comes out when the answers are worth thirty minutes, and everybody else still leaves you a written record.
Shows you what it couldn't answer
Every question it declined is a gap in your docs or your pricing page, in the words prospects actually use rather than the words you'd have guessed.
Conversations
1,204
last 30 days
Leads captured
812
67% of chats
Conversion
67%
left contact info
High priority
143
flagged urgent
What lands in your inbox
Not a name and a phone number.
Formala pulls the conversation apart into the fields you asked for, so the thing that reaches you is something you can act on without reading a transcript.
Wants SSO for a 40-seat rollout on Okta. Asked for the security overview before a call.
- company
- Northwind
- seats
- 40
- identity
- Okta, SAML SSO
- replacing
- A spreadsheet and a Slack channel
- asked for
- Security overview before a call
- lena@northwind.example
What your engineer will ask
The install is one line. These are the answers to the questions that usually come next.
- One script tag
- Loaded async, so it never blocks your page. About 43KB gzipped, no dependencies, no build step, nothing to add to package.json.
- It cannot break your layout
- The whole widget renders inside a shadow root. Its styles cannot leak onto your page, and your layout rules cannot reach in and break it.
- No cookies
- It sets none. What it needs to remember it keeps in the visitor's own browser storage.
- Locked to your domains
- List the domains it is allowed to answer on, and the embed id stops working anywhere else.
- Voice is a separate download
- The speech bundle is only fetched the first time somebody presses the microphone. A site that never uses voice never loads it.
Questions software companies ask
- How is this different from the chat widget we already looked at?
- What happens when it doesn't know. It's built to decline rather than guess, and every decline is logged as a gap for you to fill. The thing gets more accurate over time instead of more confident.
- Can it stop unqualified demos landing on the calendar?
- It asks first. You tell it what a good fit looks like, and it only offers the calendar when the answers line up. Everybody else still gets a real answer and still gets written up, they just don't take a founder's morning.
- Will it promise a roadmap date?
- No, and that's deliberate. If you haven't told it when something ships, it says it doesn't know and takes the question down for you. A date you didn't set and can't hit is worse than no answer.
- What does it actually know about our product?
- Whatever you give it. You write the context and the answers it's allowed to give, and it works from that and nothing else. If something isn't in there, it says so rather than filling the gap from the internet.
- Does it replace our sales team?
- No. It covers the part before a person is worth spending, which is also the part nobody is doing at eleven at night. What reaches your team is a written-up conversation instead of a name and an email address.
- How is it priced?
- A flat monthly plan with a conversation allowance. Not per seat, and not per resolved ticket, so a good month for your website is not a surprise on the invoice. The tiers are further down this page.
- Do we still need the chat tool we already pay for?
- Depends what you use it for. Formala answers pre-sales questions from what you gave it and declines the rest, then writes up who asked and what they needed. That is a different job from running support conversations with your customers all day. If you do both in one tool today, the honest split is to keep that for logged-in support and put Formala where strangers land.
The chat in the corner is live, not a screenshot. It is Formala doing this exact job for Formala: answering the pre-sales questions on the page you are reading, and deciding whether a call is worth anybody's time. Ask it what it does when somebody asks about a feature that isn't built yet.
How it works
From nothing to live in three steps.
No IT department required. Formala is built for contractors, studios, clinics, agencies, and realtors. Every small team whose next customer starts as a website visitor.
Build it in two minutes
A guided wizard drafts your greeting, the openers visitors can tap, your questions and your FAQs, tuned to your business. You pick a persona and a voice, then tweak anything you like.
Paste one line
Drop a single script tag on your site. That's the whole install. WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, or hand-written HTML.
<script data-form-id="frm_a1b2c3d4" />Get real leads
Formala greets visitors, presses for specifics, and hands you a structured lead in your dashboard and inbox.
…and this is what you wake up to.
Not transcripts to read. Leads to call. Every conversation arrives named, categorized, prioritized, and summarized.
Dashboard
Leads
2 new leads waiting · 1 marked high priority
- 2m ago
Wedding for 120 guests in June, budget around $8k. Wants a call this week.
Priya ShahEventsHigh priority
- 1h ago
Website redesign with a Q3 launch, budget around $30k. Ready to scope.
Marcus LeeSales
- 3h ago
Asked for a balayage on Saturday morning and left a number to confirm on.
AnonymousBooking
- Yesterday
Bathroom remodel, roughly $15k, hoping to start next month.
Sam RiveraSales
Pricing
Simple pricing. Every core feature included.
Start with 30 free conversations over 30 days, no card. Every plan has every core feature. Bigger plans add volume, and Growth and up learn from real chats, Pro adds the AI follow-up engine, and Business adds auto-sent replies plus seats for your team. How billing works →
Growth
$39/mo
400 conversations / month
about 10¢ per conversation
- Every core feature
- Learns from real chats
- Team seats
Pro
$79/mo
1,000 conversations / month
about 8¢ per conversation
- Every core feature
- Learns from real chats
- Team seats
- AI follow-up engine
- Send from your own domain
Business
$149/mo
2,500 conversations / month
about 6¢ per conversation
- Every core feature
- Learns from real chats
- Team seats
- AI follow-up engine
- Send from your own domain
- Auto-sent AI replies
And it never switches off
$0 a monthNo card to start. Your first 30 conversations are answered by the AI, over 30 days. After that the AI stops answering and the rest of it keeps working, for nothing, for as long as you like, carrying a small “Powered by Formala” line that any paid plan removes.
- The contact formThe widget falls back to your own form, so a visitor who wants to reach you still can, and the lead still lands in your inbox.
- Direct messagesVisitors can still leave a message for you or for a named person on your team, and reply to yours from the same thread.
- BookingYour booking page keeps taking appointments, with the reminders and the calendar sync that go with them.
Add voice: let visitors talk to it out loud
A microphone in the chat. Visitors speak instead of typing and hear the answer back, and you get the same transcript and the same lead as any other conversation. Works with any plan, on as many forms as you like.
$59/mo200 spoken minutes a month
Not sure what something does? Every feature, explained in plain English →
Every plan starts with a free 30-day trial: no card required, cancel anytime. If Formala catches one job you'd have missed, it's paid for itself.
Priced for small businesses, not enterprises.
You get the qualifying, structuring, and follow-up you'd expect from tools that cost far more, at pennies per conversation.
| Formala | A plain contact form | Chat / chatbot suites | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turns vague visitors into qualified leads | — | Limited | |
| Clean, structured leads, no transcripts to read | Limited | — | |
| Answers 24/7 and follows up on its own | — | Limited | |
| Live in minutes. One line, no code or setup fees | Limited | — | |
| Your brand, no “powered by” badge (any paid plan) | Limited | — | |
| Typical cost | From $19/mo · ~6–13¢ a chat | Free, but converts like a form | ~$30–130/seat + ~$1 per AI chat |
You pay less at every size
| Chats / mo | A comparable AI form tool | Formala |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | $59/mo | $39/moGrowth · 400 included |
| 500 | $98/mo | $79/moPro · 1,000 included |
| 2,000 | $330/mo | $149/moBusiness · 2,500 included |
Up to ~2.5× cheaper per conversation, and it does more.
Other tools' prices reflect major providers' publicly listed rates (AI form tools by conversation tier; live-chat suites per seat plus a per-AI-answer fee) and may change, so compare current plans before deciding.
Stop losing the visitors who almost reached out.
Set Formala up in the time it takes to read this page.
Start free for 30 daysNo card required · cancel anytime · your data stays yours