How to run Formbricks on Saplo: unlimited surveys and NPS as a Typeform alternative

Typeform is convenient until you start counting responses. With the Basic plan at $39 per month, you get 100 responses per month and one seat. The Business plan costs $129 (about $91 with annual billing) and gives you 10,000 responses and five seats. That comes to roughly $81 to $115 per month, or from $979 to over $1,223 a year. Once you reach the response limit, the form simply stops collecting data until the beginning of the next period.

There is another option: Formbricks, an open-source platform for surveys, forms and customer satisfaction research that you host on your own server. No fee per response, no survey limit, and your data stays with you. In this guide, we show you how to run Formbricks on Saplo, what it really costs, when it makes sense, and when you are better off staying with Typeform.

You can find the app page in the App catalog here: Formbricks on Saplo.

What is Formbricks

Formbricks is a feedback collection tool that combines three things:

• Link surveys, meaning a classic Typeform-style form. You send a link by email, paste it into social media or an invoice footer.
• Website and in-app surveys. After pasting a short JavaScript script, the survey appears at the right moment for the user, for example after clicking a purchase button or on their third visit. This is the area where you would typically pay for Hotjar Surveys.
• Ready-made research templates: NPS (would you recommend us to a friend), CSAT (satisfaction after contacting support), a product market fit survey, subscription cancellation reasons, post-delivery feedback.

There is also conditional logic (different questions depending on the answer), more than 20 question types (scale, matrix, ranking, multiple choice, file upload), built-in results charts and response exports to CSV and Excel. The project is developed publicly on GitHub and has a large, active user community.

We install the stable v3 (version v3.16.1) branch on Saplo: one application container and one PostgreSQL container. The latest v4 line additionally requires Redis and two more analytics services, so we deliberately stick with the lighter, proven configuration.

Formbricks vs. Typeform: an honest comparison

Criterion	Typeform (Business)	Formbricks on Saplo
Cost	approx. $81 to $115 per month	Box price, from $68 per year
Response limit	10,000 per month, after which the form stops	none, limited only by disk space
Number of surveys	unlimited	unlimited
Team seats	5 included in the plan	no per-person fee
Where the data is stored	provider's servers outside Poland	your Box in a data center in Germany
Surveys in the app and on the website	limited	yes, through a JavaScript script
Form design	highly polished, lots of themes	clean, customizable, less visually striking
Ready-made integrations	hundreds	basic ones plus webhooks and an API
Maintenance	handled by the provider	updates are your responsibility

When to stay with Typeform. If you collect a few dozen responses a month, pay for the Basic plan and use the form mainly as a brand business card, Typeform still has the advantage in design and the number of ready-made integrations. The same applies to teams that do not want to think about the server or updates at all. Some Formbricks features, including company SSO and advanced team roles, are part of the paid Enterprise license, so if you need them, check the current feature list for the Community version before moving.

When Formbricks wins. When the number of responses is growing, when you regularly conduct research, with NPS every quarter and a survey after every order, when the survey should appear in your app rather than only behind a link, and when customer data should not be sent to an external service. The last point matters under RODO: survey responses often contain a name, email address or feedback about a specific order.

Cost breakdown: 1, 3, 5 and 10 people

Typeform charges based on the plan, and you choose a plan according to the number of responses and seats. Formbricks on Saplo costs the same as Box, regardless of the number of people and responses. Below are the annual prices for a typical scenario: a few people on your team collecting several thousand responses each month.

Team	Typeform (annually, approximately)	Formbricks on Saplo (annually)
1 person, up to 1,000 responses	Plus: approx. $585	Box M: $69
3 people, up to 1,000 responses	Plus: approx. $585	Box M: $69
5 people, up to 10,000 responses	Business: approx. $976	Box L: $149
10 people, more than 10,000 responses	Business plus additional seats or Enterprise	Box L: $149

The Typeform amounts are converted from prices in dollars when paying annually, so they change with the exchange rate. Saplo prices are fixed, and the price for the first period is the same as the renewal price. With Box, you can also run other apps alongside Formbricks, such as a company website or newsletter, with no additional charge for each one.

Requirements and choosing a Box

The Formbricks setup on Saplo requires:

• at least 2 GB of RAM (the Next.js application plus your own PostgreSQL),
• at least 5 GB of storage for images, the database, and uploaded files,
• Docker, with the engine installed automatically,
• a domain or subdomain, because surveys need a permanent HTTPS address.

Choosing a plan:

• Box M (2 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD, $69 per year) is enough to get started when Formbricks is the only or almost the only application on the Box. Box M also comes with SSH access, which is useful when connecting email.
• Box L (6 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, $149 per year) is the choice for smooth operation: Formbricks alongside a website, store, or other tools, higher traffic on in-app surveys, and 7-day backups included.
• Box S (1 GB RAM) is too small: the application and database will not fit in memory.

Box XL and Box XXL only make sense once Formbricks is one of many resource-heavy applications in a company. A full comparison of the plans is available in the Saplo price list.

Installation step by step

1. Log in to the Saplo panel and open App catalog. You will find Formbricks in the data category. You can also start from the Formbricks page and click the deployment button.
2. Choose Box. If it does not have enough free memory, the panel will let you know before the installation, rather than after a failed attempt.
3. Specify the address. The easiest option is a subdomain such as ankiety.saploapp.pl. However, your own domain looks better, for example feedback.yourcompany.com, because customers will see this address in the survey link. The SSL certificate will be issued automatically.
4. Confirm the installation. The engine installs Docker, downloads the Formbricks image and the PostgreSQL image, generates a random database password and three security keys (for sessions, data encryption, and internal recurring jobs), and starts both containers.
5. Wait. On first startup, Formbricks runs through its full database migration history, more than one hundred steps. On a fresh Box, this usually takes a few minutes, longer than with lightweight applications. The installation is complete only once the application actually responds at your address.
6. When the status changes to running, open the address in your browser.

Installation details, container names, and commands for previewing logs are saved in the FORMBRICKS-SETUP.txt file in the application directory. The Saplo panel will show you its contents whenever you need them.

First launch: owner account and first survey

Formbricks does not have a pre-generated admin password. The first visit to the site opens the setup wizard:

1. Enter your first name, email address, and password. This account becomes the organization owner.
2. Name the organization, for example after your company, and your first project. A project is usually one product, a shop, or a website.
3. Choose whether you want to start with a link survey or an on-site survey. You can always add the second type later.

The fastest way to build your first survey is to use a template. A good starting point is NPS: one question about how likely you are to recommend the product or service on a scale from 0 to 10, and one open-ended question asking for the reason behind your score. Formbricks will calculate the score and divide the responses into promoters, passives, and detractors.

Email address verification and password reset are disabled in this installation because they would not work without a connected mail server anyway. So save the owner account password in your password manager. If you forget it, without SMTP you will not be able to recover it using the button in your browser.

Survey on your website and in the app

Formbricks' biggest advantage over a regular form is surveys displayed at the right moment. Here's how it works:

1. In the project settings, you'll find a JavaScript code snippet with the environment ID and your installation address.
2. Paste it into your website: in WordPress via a plugin for inserting code in the header, or in Next.js or Django in the main template.
3. In the survey, you set a trigger: visiting a specific subpage, clicking an element, time spent on the page, or a custom event sent from the code, for example after an order is completed.
4. You set how often one person can see the survey so you don't annoy loyal customers.

This way, you ask about delivery while the customer is just considering it, rather than a week later in an email nobody opens. If your website also runs on Saplo, the survey and the website run on the same server, and you don't load scripts from an external service.

Teamwork and email

Self-hosted Formbricks does not allow open registration by default: without an invitation, only the first account, created in the setup wizard, can sign in. You invite other people from the organization settings. This is good news for security, because no outsider will create an account just because they know the address.

Formbricks sends invitations and notifications about new responses by email. The standard installation on Saplo does not have a mail server set up, so if you want several people to work with it, you should add one:

1. Open the docker-compose.yml file in the app directory (the file manager in the panel or via SSH from Box M).
2. In the environment section of the Formbricks container, add the SMTP server details: address, port, username, password, and sender address. The Formbricks documentation lists the variable names in the email configuration section. You can use a mailbox on the company domain you have with Box.
3. Restart the app from the panel.

Once the mail server is set up, you can also re-enable email verification and password reset by removing the EMAIL_VERIFICATION_DISABLED and PASSWORD_RESET_DISABLED variables.

Security and GDPR

• Your data stays on Box. Responses are stored in PostgreSQL in a separate container that is visible only to the application. The database is not exposed to the internet.
• Encryption in transit. Surveys work exclusively over HTTPS with an automatic certificate.
• The keys are random for each installation. The engine generates a separate session key, encryption key and cron job key. Do not copy them between installations or paste them anywhere.
• Collect only what you need. If your survey asks for an email address, include a brief note about the purpose of processing and a link to the privacy policy. Formbricks also lets you run fully anonymous surveys.
• Backups. Box L includes 7-day backups. Regardless, export important results to CSV from time to time.
• Updates. Before changing the image version, export your data. Moving to the v4 line is a major architectural change, not a regular update, so do not blindly swap the image tag.

Most common problems

Installation takes a long time and seems stuck. This is usually a database migration during the first startup. The engine waits for the application to respond for up to 10 minutes. If the installation fails after this time, the error message will show the end of the container logs.

The site shows a 502 error immediately after a restart. Formbricks needs a moment to start after being restarted. Wait a minute and refresh the page. If the error persists, check the logs using the command from the FORMBRICKS-SETUP.txt file.

An invited collaborator did not receive an email. Without SMTP configured, no emails will be sent. Add a mail server according to the section above.

The survey does not appear on the site. Check three things: whether the script is pasted into this subpage, whether the survey trigger matches what you are doing, and whether the survey is published rather than saved as a draft. Formbricks also remembers that a particular person has already seen the survey, so use an incognito window for testing.

There is not enough memory after adding more applications. Formbricks with its database takes up a significant portion of 2 GB on Box M. When other applications run alongside it, move to Box L. The upgrade does not require reinstallation.

The owner's password has been forgotten. Without SMTP, the password reset will not work. This is why the password should be saved directly to a password manager, and SMTP should be configured before more people join the team.

Summary

Formbricks gives you what you pay Typeform monthly for: unlimited-response surveys, NPS and satisfaction surveys, surveys displayed in your app and on your website, and access for your entire team without a per-seat fee. The tradeoff is a little maintenance: connecting your email and keeping updates manageable.

On Saplo, installation takes just a few clicks, and the cost is the Box price: from $69 per year with Box M or $149 per year with Box L and backups, instead of several thousand dollars per year on the Business plan. Start with the Formbricks page in the App catalog, and choose your plan in Saplo pricing.