Online forms are useful for all sorts of things: privately, for a survey about the next family gathering; in a business context, for collecting leads or onboarding new team members. Marketing and product research make use of them regularly as well.
You probably know SurveyMonkey (a US company) or Typeform (originally from Spain, now headquartered in the US). Of course, the big CRMs and support desks come with built-in surveys, but then you can only use them inside that one ecosystem.
Today, I want to introduce a small form product from Belgium (Ghent): Tally. What makes Tally special? It is a young company that built a highly mature product without outside funding, before the AI era even began (development started in 2020). This means we will be talking about bootstrapped software out of Europe.
Tally’s founding team stresses that their success rests on building a product with a very small team and giving away generous free features. That approach, they argue, brought such a large user base that, in the end, enough people were willing to take out a premium subscription. It is unlikely that such a business model would have worked with outside capital. Are you as curious as I am? Let’s take a close look at Tally.
What are Tally’s features?
Tally is a survey tool built on blocks. The editor feels like an easy-to-navigate document, simple and intuitive. Even on the free plan you can create unlimited surveys and receive unlimited responses. Their competition does not offer such generous free plans.
The surveys are easy to embed in a website, have a look at my contact page for example. But the links can also be sent to people directly. Sure, simple forms like the one on my contact page are something many providers offer. However, I built mine just by describing it in natural language, connecting to Tally’s MCP (a protocol for AI models to talk to external applications) through an AI. More recently, Tally has an AI agent built right in that creates the forms on your behalf.
But quite often you have requirements that go beyond simple forms. Not long ago I needed a complex registration form for an event. Depending on an earlier choice, questions were shown or hidden, sections skipped, and so on. In short: a complex use case. Tally supports complex logic jumps, and calculations too. The tool has its limits, there is no visual builder for the logical dependencies, but most cases are covered thoroughly. And the great part is that you don’t need a paid subscription for any of it.
And yes, Tally also comes with a lot of integration options, here is a good overview. That includes the well-known automation tools like Zapier or Make, but there are also direct integrations with Google Sheets and analytics tools.
But Tally is more than its features. Let’s take a closer look at the ideas behind it.
The product philosophy
What makes Tally so likeable is the company’s honesty when it comes to their product development. They follow clear values: they are a product, not a platform. They only build what genuinely matters, and they say “no” very, very often. Ideas have to prove themselves, which is why they always start with prototypes. If those fall flat in the community, the projects get killed. How do the users decide? Tally’s roadmap is public and there are lively discussions. There is a good article that traces Tally’s path to 5 million dollars in annual revenue. But why all the fuss? They want to stay independent with a good product. Growth and revenue are not the focus.
Moreover, the design is plain and appealing. That was their approach from the start: Tally should be easy to use and well designed. After all, forms and surveys are something a company or a product presents to the outside world. And so, over the past six years, their focus on the free part of the product paid off too: beautiful forms and surveys carry the Tally logo, and that advertises the product to potential new users. You’ll find plenty of reports from the team on their own blog.
What I personally love is their clear documentation. I looked after product documentation for years and I know how hard it is to make organisations see the value of docs (which, in the end, is customer support). At Tally you can see that good service for customers is simply a natural part of their philosophy. Have a look around, everything is really well organised.
Tally in the “European sovereignty” ecosystem
The Tally team did not set out to build a purely European product. Design and bootstrapping were their focus from the start. Their big role model was and is the US product “Notion”. They always addressed a global user base that didn’t care where the company was based.
The product is hosted on Google Cloud in Belgium. They are European, but they rest on US companies, not only for hosting. They also use Google AI, Cloudflare and other non-European applications. This is not meant as criticism: Tally doesn’t present itself as something it isn’t, they stand by the products they use. It is simply part of the full picture.
Tally is a small, young company with a pretty good product that listens radically to its own customers. It was built without outside funding. And it comes from Europe on top of that. But it plays only a passive role in reducing dependencies on US firms.