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Many people have had the same response, and it bears repeating.

Why have a free version if you can’t use it? You can install it but you can’t see whether it correctly returns entries? Silly. I already saw that Formidable employees try to move the conversation to their site whenever you comment.

Once you get to the site, they tell it’s very hard to view entries. Formidable wasn’t designed for that.

Frustrating free version that shouldn’t be offered at all without proper documentation. I would have even been willing to buy it instead of Gravity, if it worked. You don’t have to give away all your bells and whistles, but it should work.

This FREE version is a waste of time. Don’t bother.

Now just a contact page, a full API for developing a perfect solution to from getting customers to getting paid.

Jeff Kesemeyer
Keep it Green, Inc.
http://www.KeepItGreenLawnCare.com

THE FREE ROMANCE:
You start with a free plugin. What is there not to like about FREE, like?

THE LOW END COMMITMENT:
Well, as planned, you soon start considering buying it. I did, spent over $100, so that I could deliver the iterative block to one of my clients.Essentially, you can repeat on a block of the form while others remain as a single thread. My case: data about many children, associated to only one parent block.
At this point, the client is excited, and you have invested a LOT of time on the forms. Why a LOT?
* The alignment and columnar layout is fragile, things go bonkers and there is no safe way to debug it, except developing a lot of the same stuff over and over
* The documentation is ALL OVER THE MAP, and the docs search is really bad
* Some options, like the bootstrap module, destroyed all my site’s CSS… three days of development after the last back up. You know what that means. :(. Here is where the ‘take-it-or-leave-it” modality of their support starts to show up: “Oh, well, you can just TURN OFF all the CSS for Formidable!” ??? My theme’s CSS is not designed to show forms, that was supposed to be YOUR job!
But you limp around, your client loves that the forms are pretty and neat…

THE “PRO” FISH HOOK
Let’s face it, the “BUSINESS” version of the Pro is what the core plugin should do. Unless you want to collect forms that can only be viewed online, and with a lot of limitations (tables with entries get large as you add columns, and go try to add lateral layout to a fixed-layout plugin (or any theme layout for that matter).
“Oh, you wanted to export the data? Then you need to spend ANOTHER $200 and get the next upgrade.”
Further, any large enough form requires you to view it in Google table format, which is why having that as an option sounded SO attractive.
So I did, spent the $200.
My client was now fully committed to the solution. Started building export pages… and that’s where reality kicked in…

YOU FEEL A SUDDEN SHOCK, AND YOU LAND OUT OF THE WATER
It turns out that neither Google table format, OR export of VIEWS works with iterative blocks!!!

The process of getting to understand this showed me that the company’s support is sub-standard. Prompt responses but containing only patronizing, obvious answers (“Yes, of course I tried that already… duh”

Until Support finally acknowledges that nothing works with the “repeating blocks”, and states very matter-of-factly that “There is no ETA for a solution”. In other words, sorry, we won’t fix it. Tough luck.

So, the more you commit to this sub-standard plugin, the more you will pay…

THE PRICE YOU END UP PAYING:
* You probably will lose a client, who will now hate your company for all the pain you have taken them through (“Hey, it looks really nice, it must be that the developers are incapable”)
* You WILL need to re-develop the forms in some other package. I still haven’t even looked into it, because the client is going through the peak of their form activity this month
* You will need to manually provide the data to your client, because now they really need it.. and EXPORT doesn’t work
* You will (hopefully) get a credit, but you end up buy-in it again! Why? Well, because Formidable turns out your license a few hours after the credit went through… and you still have all the forms still active in your client’s site, generating more and more data while they wait to be replaced.

I ended up spending over five solid weeks in the forms and all their collateral pages, exports, views, etc. I will never recover that, because I need to start from zero soon… and on top I will never get the second payment of $200 back.

Great features to accommodate most of the business requirements