Google Forms costs nothing and takes five minutes to learn, and for a lot of jobs that is the correct answer. This page is about what happens when the form is the front door to a business process rather than a one-off poll.
Pricing and plan limits verified July 2026
Credit where it is due
This one is easy to concede, and conceding it should buy us some credibility for the rest of the page.
The evidence
Nothing below is our characterisation of Google Forms. Each item is either something Google Forms publishes about itself, or something we observed firsthand in a real account and can show you.
We went looking on 25 July 2026. The Responses tab offers exactly one route for your data: Link to Sheets. Everything past that point — getting it into Salesforce, matching a response to the right contact, reporting on it next to your CRM data — is labour you supply, every wave, forever. It never amortises, because there is nothing to amortise.
Observed firsthand, 25 July 2026.Not a gated one — none. The realistic options are Zapier on the Professional plan (from $19.99 per month, with Salesforce premium-app-gated on top), an Apps Script you now own and maintain, or a comma-separated file per wave. And Zapier meters: at their published list prices the 2,000-task tier is $49 a month billed annually — $588 a year, about 2.45¢ per task at full utilisation. A Zap with a trigger and two billable actions therefore runs roughly 4.9¢ per survey response, since triggers themselves do not bill. That is our arithmetic on their published prices, shown so you can check it rather than take it.
Prices verified against Zapier’s published pricing on 25 July 2026: Professional starts at $19.99/mo (750 tasks) and the 2,000-task tier is $49/mo billed annually. The per-response figure is our arithmetic on those list prices, not a Zapier number. Their premium-app gating of the Salesforce connector is documented in the app directory rather than on the pricing page, so we have not linked that part.12 question types, no AI assist, and no NPS widget. Branching exists only as “Go to section based on answer”, works only on multiple-choice and dropdown questions, and requires you to restructure the whole form into sections to use it.
Observed firsthand, 25 July 2026.There is no version history of any kind. Delete a question and the answers collected against it are gone. Change a question's type and it orphans the column in your linked Sheet. There is no bulk edit; the add-on market that loads questions from a Sheet into Forms is strictly one-way, and the moment it runs, the Sheet stops being the source of truth.
Google Forms product behaviour, observed firsthand July 2026.Link sharing, with no native reminders or scheduled follow-ups, no merge fields, and no campaign tracking. Respondents are anonymous unless you require Google sign-in — which, for customers or programme participants outside your domain, is usually not an option you have.
Observed firsthand, 25 July 2026.We know this one from building the importer. A Google Form's definition is reachable only as an undocumented positional array whose type codes Google grows without notice — there is no contract to build against, and branching flattens silently on the way out. Our importer handles it. We are telling you because it is the honest shape of Google Forms as a system of record: the data is portable, the logic is not.
Our own importer engineering against live Google Forms, July 2026.All of these are checkable in the Google Forms editor in about two minutes, and they matched our live drive on 25 July 2026: no ranking question type, no piping (you cannot carry an earlier answer into a later question's text), no cover screen, scale questions are numeric-only (no labelled Likert points), branching is section-level only, and a file-upload question forces respondents to sign in to a Google account — which for customers or programme participants outside your domain usually means the question cannot be used at all.
Verified in the Google Forms editor, July 2026, and re-checked against our own live drive on 25 July 2026. Both checks are ours — we are not claiming outside confirmation.Worth saying out loud, because a skeptic finds it anyway: Google Forms plus Zapier is genuinely the cheapest documented path from a submitted response to a Salesforce record — roughly $240 a year, since Forms is free and Zapier Professional starts at $19.99 a month. If the software floor is the only thing you are optimising, that is the winner and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it buys you is a zap you now own, build, and repair, and a form that still cannot tell you who answered.
Zapier's published pricing (Professional tier; Salesforce is a premium-app-gated connector). Verified July 2026.We do not publish an hours figure of our own, because we have not measured your team. But Plinth, a UK vendor selling case-management and survey software to charities, publishes an itemised breakdown for a charity running three funded programmes on Google Forms — and inside it, 3 hours a month goes to matching responses back to participant records, with a further 1.5 hours to exporting and cleaning the data. Those two line items are exactly the step this page is about, and exactly the step AutoSurvey does not have.
Three things to hold onto. Plinth presents this as a “realistic breakdown” for an example organisation — an illustration, not a measured study. Their total is larger, but most of it — building surveys, analysis, funder reports — is work you would still do with any tool, so the plumbing share is the 4.5 hours, not the total. And we are deliberately not converting any of it into money: Plinth sells against Google Forms, and you can price your own team's time better than we can.
Plinth, “Survey software vs Google Forms”, published 21 February 2026 (accessed 25 July 2026). Scoped by Plinth to a charity running three funded programmes and presented as an illustrative breakdown, not a measured study, with no published methodology. Plinth competes with Google Forms. Quoted in hours as published — we have not converted it to a cost.Stage by stage
Every tool on this site is fast at stage one. The interesting question is what the other five stages cost you.
| Stage | Google Forms | AutoSurvey |
|---|---|---|
| Authordraft the questions | 10–20 minutes, entirely by hand. 12 question types, no AI assist, no NPS widget. Branching is section-jumping on multiple-choice and dropdown only.Observed 25 Jul 2026 | Describe what you want to learn and AI drafts it in about 15–30 seconds, with the right Salesforce field types. AI authoring is included — no separate Salesforce AI license, no Agentforce project. |
| Publish gatewhat stops you sending | None. Everything Google Forms can do, it does for free. | One per-org price. Logic, scoring and question types are not the upsell. The deploy job runs in 30–60 seconds. |
| Distributereach known contacts | A bare link. No native reminders or scheduled follow-ups, no merge fields, no campaign tracking. Respondents are anonymous unless you force Google sign-in.Observed 25 Jul 2026 | Salesforce campaign send, list or triggered email, public link or QR, or Experience Cloud. The recipient is already a Salesforce record, so “who answered?” is never a matching problem. |
| Collectwhat happens at the cap | Unlimited, free, no viewing lock. The strongest cell on this page and we are happy to say so. | Your own org's limits. No per-response meter deciding whether you are allowed to read your own data. |
| Land in CRMthe expensive stage | No native path. Zapier Professional ($19.99/mo minimum, Salesforce premium-app-gated), an Apps Script you maintain, or a CSV per wave.Zapier published pricing | This stage does not exist. Responses are created as records in your org, linked to the contact and campaign on arrival. Nothing to map, nothing to sync, no export step. |
| Actdo something about it | Rebuild the follow-up logic in Salesforce after the import. | Score fields are stamped at submission, so the Flows you already run branch on the answer immediately — Tasks, Cases, alerts, reports, Einstein. |
Cells marked Not published are ones where Google Forms does not publish a figure and we will not estimate one. Where a cell cites firsthand observation, we hold the screenshot.
Not natively. Google Forms has no Salesforce integration. The available routes are Zapier on the Professional plan ($19.99/mo minimum, with Salesforce as a premium-app-gated connector), a Google Apps Script you write and maintain, or a CSV export per wave. Verified July 2026.
No. There is no version history of any kind. Deleting a question deletes the answers collected against it, and changing a question's type orphans the corresponding column in the linked Sheet.
12, as observed on 25 July 2026. There is no NPS question type and no AI authoring assist. Branching is limited to 'Go to section based on answer' on multiple-choice and dropdown questions.
There is a working Google Forms importer. Paste the public form link. Our importer reads the definition Google does not document — questions and answer choices come across. What moves is the survey definition — your questions and answer choices — rebuilt as a native Salesforce survey. Your response history stays where it is until you migrate it separately.
Import fidelity is still being verified against a range of real surveys, so check less common question types after import before you send live. You can run the whole thing in a sandbox first.