Hosted forms

A hosted form on Formward is a form page served at formward.eu/s/<slug> that you share by link and that needs no website of your own. Answers go through the same ingestion pipeline as an embedded form and land in the same dashboard.

The simplest way to publish is the hosted form link: a plain page that shows your form and nothing else. Switch it on under the form's Settings → Hosted pages tab and share the address. Starting a form from a hosted template switches it on for you.

Copyhttps://formward.eu/s/your-form

Switching the link off takes it down without deleting the form or its submissions, and the form's endpoint keeps working either way.

If you want more around the form, Pages is an optional page builder at formward.eu/p/<slug>. A page can hold one or more forms next to headings, text, images and buttons, with a theme and a live preview, and from Professional it can run on your own domain. A form shows the same questions on its hosted link and on any page it sits on; you edit them in the page editor's Form tab.

Hosted form or embedded form?

Use the hosted link when there is no page to put the form on yet, or when the form is the whole point: a sign-up for an event, an intake form sent by email, a feedback form linked from a receipt, a QR code on a poster. The link works on its own, needs no HTML, and is the fastest way to start collecting answers.

Embed the form (the plain HTML, AJAX or framework examples in the docs) when it belongs inside an existing site, must match its design exactly or has to sit next to other content. Both routes post to the same endpoint and share the same submissions, spam filtering, notifications, webhooks and exports, so you can start with the hosted link and embed later without losing anything.

Compared with a hosted form builder that also stores your answers on its own terms, the hosted link is just another front door to your Formward form: the data lives in your workspace in Sweden, under the same retention and export rules as every other submission.

What Free includes

Free includes unlimited hosted form links and one published page per billing owner, across all of that owner's workspaces. The address is generated for you, and the form shows Formward branding. Hosted submissions count against the same monthly allowance as embedded ones (50 on Free).

Paid plans add more hosted form links and pages, your own page address such as /p/spring-open-day (from Personal), and more page blocks and themes. Removing the Formward branding starts on Professional, for hosted form links and pages alike. The plans page has the full list.

Field types

The editor offers these question types. Required fields and validation rules (length, pattern, number range) are checked on the server, not only in the browser.

• Text, Long text, Email and Phone
• Number and Date
• Multiple choice and Dropdown, with your own options
• Rating, a 1 to 5 scale by default
• Checkbox
• File upload, on Professional and Business only. See file uploads for the limits.
• Hidden value, Calculated total, Signature, Repeating group and Matrix question for longer forms

Steps and conditional questions

A Section / step break splits the form into steps. Each step shows its own heading and a step counter, and the visitor can only move on once the required questions on that step are answered.

On Professional and Business, a question can be set to show only if an earlier question has a given answer (a ticked checkbox counts as true). A hidden question is never required, and any value sent for it is dropped before the submission is stored. On lower plans the rule is not available, and every question is always shown.

After someone submits

• Success message. Set the text visitors see once the submission is accepted.
• Redirect. If the form has a redirect URL in its settings, visitors are sent there instead. On Professional and Business you can also add redirect rules that pick a destination from the answers, for example a different page per choice.
• Notification. Each submission is emailed to your verified recipients, as with any Formward form.

Consent and spam protection

• Consent checkbox. Turn it on in the form's privacy settings and write your own wording. It can be optional or required. When it is ticked, Formward stores the configured text and the time with the submission. Available on every plan. See GDPR consent checkbox.
• Honeypot and rate limit. A hidden field catches simple bots, and floods are limited on a hashed IP, the same as on embedded forms.
• Cloudflare Turnstile. Optional, on every plan. When you enable it for the form, the hosted page shows the challenge. Cloudflare is a US provider and only sees challenge data from the browser, not the answers.
• AI spam scoring. On Professional and Business, each submission is scored by Mistral AI in France unless you switch it off for the form.

Downloads on a page

The Downloads block on a page either links to a file on another site or offers a file you upload in the editor. Every uploaded file is checked for viruses before anyone can see it, and the editor shows the state while it waits: Scanning, visible on the page once clean.

• File types. PDF, Word (docx), Excel (xlsx), PowerPoint (pptx), plain text, CSV, RTF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP and SVG. Professional and Business also take zip and tar.gz archives. A file must really be the type its name says, so a renamed file is refused. Executables and scripts such as exe, bat, msi, cmd, sh, php, js, html, css, py, dll, sys and iso are never accepted: not on their own, not inside an archive, and not hidden behind a double extension like report.exe.pdf. Archives may not contain other archives or links, and every file inside must be an allowed type; an SVG image can be uploaded on its own but not inside an archive. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are checked part by part: they must hold only what Office itself writes (document parts, images, fonts, audio and video, printer settings, and the workbook behind a chart). Macros, embedded OLE objects, other embedded files and files with unknown parts are refused; saving a clean copy, or pasting a picture instead of an object, fixes that.
• Size. Per file and in total for the workspace: Free 2 MB and 50 MB, Personal 10 MB and 200 MB, Professional 25 MB and 1 GB, Business 100 MB and 5 GB. Page downloads have their own storage, separate from form attachments. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and archives are also counted at their unpacked size, which may not exceed 128 MB: the scanner has to unpack them to check what is inside. A file that goes past what the scanner can handle is marked too large for the virus scan in the editor and is not shown; delete it and upload a smaller one.
• Virus scan. Files are scanned with ClamAV on Formward's own servers. They are never sent to an outside scanning service. A file that is flagged is deleted straight away, and the editor tells you why. A password-protected PDF or archive cannot be looked into, so it is refused as encrypted and not shown; upload an unprotected copy. Files that a published page still offers are scanned again about once a week, so a file that was clean when you uploaded it is checked against newer signatures.
• Links that expire. The download link a visitor gets is created when the page loads and stops working after 10 minutes, so a copied link does not stay public. Reloading the page gives a fresh one. Files are always sent as downloads and never opened in the browser.
• Personal data. Files you add here are your own content. Files that visitors upload through your form fields can hold personal data such as CVs or ID documents, and storing those needs an accepted Data Processing Agreement. The editor shows whether yours is accepted and links to where you can accept it. See file uploads for form attachments.

Languages

The text Formward supplies, such as buttons, validation messages and the default thank-you text, is available in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish. It follows the visitor's browser language, or the one you pin with ?lang=de (or another code) in the link. Your own questions are shown exactly as you wrote them.

Search engines

Hosted form links and pages ask search engines not to index them unless you opt in. For a page, the indexing switch is part of the page's search settings, which start on Personal.

Privacy and data residency

Data from a hosted form is handled exactly like data from an embedded form. Submissions and files are stored in Sweden, notification email is sent through Mailjet from the EU, and IP addresses are stored only as a keyed hash. Your form's retention setting applies: 30 days on Free, your choice on paid plans. Data leaves the EU only where you send it: a notification or autoresponder inbox hosted outside the EU, a webhook, or a Google Sheets sync. The sub-processor register lists every provider involved.

Limitations

• No payments. Hosted forms collect answers only.
• Not a research survey tool. Conditions compare one earlier answer with one value. There are no response quotas or randomised question order.

When you get a website, the form does not change: point your own <form> at its endpoint and keep the same submissions, recipients and history. The online forms use case walks through publishing a first form.