Youform

Promptfree, for everyone, and the only version there is

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Build me a conversational form builder that replaces Youform: one question per screen, unlimited responses, on my own machine.

Read this first: the product you are replacing is already the cheap answer — a flat fee for unlimited responses, aimed at people leaving the expensive incumbent. Once you count your own hosting and your own time, the money case is thin. The reasons that hold up are that the responses never leave your machine, the form sits on your own domain with no third-party script, and it can be embedded anywhere your product needs it.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with progressive enhancement
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- forms: id, slug, name, version, definition_json, theme_json, status, published_at, close_at, response_limit, redirect_url
- form_versions: id, form_id, version, definition_json, published_at — a submission records the version it answered, so editing never rewrites what somebody said
- submissions: id, form_id, form_version, token, status, started_at, submitted_at, ip_hash, referrer_host, country, device, hidden_fields_json
- answers: id, submission_id, question_key, value_text, value_num, value_json, answered_at, ms_spent
- files: id, submission_id, question_key, original_name, path, sha256, mime_detected, bytes, scan_status
- events: id, submission_id, kind, question_key, at — shown, answered, skipped, back, abandoned. Append-only
- Partial submissions kept. Four answers out of nine is information, and discarding it throws away the most honest part of the data

THE INTERACTION
- One question per screen, large, with the prompt readable at a glance
- Enter advances; the whole form completable from the keyboard, with letter keys selecting choices. That detail is what makes the format fast rather than slow, and it is the one most copies miss
- Back always works and never loses an answer
- Each question is a real URL, so the browser's own back and forward behave and a refresh loses nothing. Enhancement smooths the transition; without JavaScript it is a working sequence of pages
- Answers saved as they are given, so a closed tab leaves a partial
- Resumable by a token, emailed if an address has been collected

QUESTION KINDS
- Short and long text, email, phone, url, number, date, dropdown, multiple choice, picture choice, yes or no, rating, scale, ranking, matrix, file upload, legal consent, and a statement with no answer
- Each with a parser, a validator, a keyboard interaction, an accessible template and a CSV form. One contract, implemented per kind

LOGIC
- Jump to a question or an ending based on earlier answers
- An explicit expression tree over previous answers, never evaluated code, with one evaluator used by the server and the browser so what is shown and what is accepted cannot disagree
- Scores and calculations with a dependency graph, so a cycle is caught at publish rather than by somebody filling it in
- Several endings with their own messages and redirects
- Hidden fields from query parameters
- The definition validated on publish: an unreachable question, an unknown reference, or a jump past a required question is an error before anybody sees it

THEMING AND EMBEDDING
- Colours, font, background, button style, and a cover — it should look like the site it belongs to, not like a form vendor's product
- A hosted page at its own URL, an inline embed that resizes itself with a postMessage handshake rather than a guessed iframe height, a side panel, and a pop-up trigger
- Open Graph tags and a generated share image, because a form link is often what gets posted

ACCESSIBILITY, WHICH THIS FORMAT MAKES HARDER
- Respect `prefers-reduced-motion` completely — no transitions at all when it is set. The conversational format is animation-heavy by default and that is a problem for real people
- Each question announced when it appears, focus moved to it, errors announced rather than only coloured
- A link to see every question on one page, which is both an accessibility answer and a courtesy to anybody who wants to know what they are committing to

SPAM AND LIMITS
- Honeypot, a minimum time on form, and rate limits per address hash
- A response limit and a closing date per form, with a message when it is reached
- Every rejected submission stored rather than dropped, so a false positive is recoverable

AFTER
- Notification to the owner and an autoresponder, each conditional, each with a per-recipient daily cap
- Webhooks on submission, signed and retried with backoff, idempotent by submission id
- Export CSV and JSON, complete, including partials

RESULTS
- Per question: distributions for choices, averages with distributions for ratings, the raw list for text
- Drop-off per question, which this format gives you precisely — you know exactly which question lost them, and a single-page form never can. Lead the reporting with that
- Time per question, and completion by device

OPERATIONS
- .env: DATABASE_PATH, STORAGE_PATH, BASE_URL, SESSION_SECRET, HASH_SALT, SMTP_URL
- Migrations on boot, each once
- Nightly backup off the machine, restore script
- Health endpoint

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The keyboard path and per-question drop-off. Make the whole form completable without a mouse and record every question shown as well as every one answered. The first is why people finish; the second is the only analytical reason to prefer this format.

Give me the repository, migrations, .env.example, the embed script, a seed form with jumps, and a README with deploy steps behind Caddy.