Scaling with Formsort

If you’re building custom forms, you need to build backend systems that can collect and process results as they are being filled out by responders. As companies grow their audience and gain the ability to leverage more and more insight from their responders (both from their answers and their journey through the flow), responder data volume grows in step. 

If you’re an engineer, you need to ensure that these services have high uptime and can scale with user traffic. Otherwise you risk losing your most precious commodity: data.

Building out this important infrastructure is undifferentiated heavy lifting that doesn’t directly add value to a brand’s products or services. It can also be incredibly expensive due to the engineering skill sets required to do it well.

While Formsort gives users a powerful form builder, we also act as a service that can scale globally to collect both responder answers and their behavior as they move through a flow. Formsort also gives tools to connect that data into the services and platforms through our integrations.

Why is this problem important for engineers?

The problem of scale: Building public web services to ingest form results becomes more and more difficult as your audience and flow responders grows.

The problem of cost: Engineers want the quickest path to empower their company with data by getting it into the platforms of their choice without having to build out custom infrastructure.

The problem of reliability: Engineers also want a service that is fault tolerant and that can still deliver the data when their own systems or services go down.

How does Formsort address this problem?

Formsort has built a global, serverless and event-driven service that can collect flow data at whatever level of granularity customers need. We leverage AWS and  built out a micro-service architecture that is fault-tolerant, reliable, and can scale with your traffic, empowering our clients to hone in on what is most important to them in a flow, while decreasing the level of effort for their engineering teams to deliver.

Want to see how a responder’s answers change as they progress step by step? We provide partial submissions to give you those snapshots. Want to see what a particular answer was when the responder fills it out? We provide savepoints. Just interested in seeing the end result when a responder has completed your flow? We give you finalized answers.

Additionally, we provide integrations that allow you to pick the right tool for the job. Partial submissions tend to generate a large amount of traffic, since they are collected on every step. This is perfect for a data warehouse integration like BigQuery. Final submissions tend to happen less frequently, but are more important in terms of how customers act on them, making them perfect for a webhook integration that gives customers maximum control over how they are processed.

It’s also important that if a customer’s services go down, that we have a way to deliver their data after an outage occurs. We have built out an automated recovery system for answer delivery that ensures that even if a customer's integrations are unavailable for a period of time, we can still deliver those answers through retries in the future to prevent data loss.

Want to learn more?

Check out our integrations to understand backend destinations we support. You can also sign up here to start building your form.