Tally review: free plan, Pro and Business pricing, limits and safety

What Tally is: a form builder, not a form backend

Tally is a hosted form builder. You write the form in an editor that works like a document (type a slash to add a block), then publish it. Respondents fill it in on a tally.so link, on your own subdomain if you pay for Pro, or inside an embed on your site. Tally stores the submissions and shows them in its Submissions tab, with CSV export, PDF export and integrations.

That is a different job from a form backend such as splitforms, which publishes this review. A form backend receives the POST from an HTML form you wrote and host yourself. Tally doesn't offer that: its API can list, fetch and delete submissions and create or edit forms, but the API reference has no endpoint for creating a submission, so you can't point your own form's action at Tally. The two products overlap only when you haven't built the form yet.

Embeds work on any site and are free. Tally's developer docs say the standard embed renders the form inside an iframe, loaded by Tally's widget script, and popup and full-page embeds are also available. Page URL and query parameters can be passed into hidden fields. By default Tally forms are not indexed by search engines; Pro lets you turn indexing on.

• Build: block editor at tally.so; you can start without an account, but the terms require one to publish
• Share: tally.so link, custom (sub)domain on Pro, standard, popup or full-page embed
• Collect: Submissions tab, CSV download, PDF per response, integrations, webhooks, API

Is Tally free? What the free plan really includes

Yes. The pricing page says Tally gives you unlimited forms and submissions for free, with no time restriction, as long as you stay within its fair usage guidelines. The help center adds that 99% of Tally's features are free. The free list on the pricing page includes payments, signatures, file uploads, a custom thank-you page, self email notifications, redirect on completion, conditional logic and calculations, duplicate prevention, password protection, closing forms on a limit or date, answer piping, 45+ languages, and the Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make and webhook integrations.

The limit is the fair use policy, and unusually, Tally publishes numbers for it. Its examples of extensive usage are consistently collecting around 50,000 submissions a month, 100 GB of file uploads a month or 500 GB of total storage, or sending 50,000 email notifications a month. Occasional spikes are fine; Tally says it reaches out when high volume lasts three to four consecutive months, and then proposes a custom plan billed quarterly on top of your subscription. If you decline, it says it gives you time to move elsewhere.

What Free leaves out is mostly branding and polish: the "Made with Tally" badge stays, notification emails come from Tally with a fixed layout, respondent confirmation emails are not available, and the 10 MB per-file upload limit applies. Tally's terms also forbid collecting passwords, card numbers, bank account numbers or Social Security numbers in any Tally form.

Tally Pro and Business: what they add, what they cost, and billing

Pro is $29 a month or $290 a year, and Business is $89 a month or $890 a year, according to Tally's plan pages. The pricing page opens with yearly billing selected, which is why it shows $24 and $74 per month. Yearly billing is described as 17% off, or two months free. Tally bills in USD or EUR depending on your location.

Pro is the plan most people upgrade to. It removes the Tally branding and adds custom domains (no limit on how many), unlimited team members with workspaces and folders, partial submissions, custom CSS and extra design options, customizable notification emails and respondent emails sent from your own domain, uploads with no file size limit, drop-off and extended visit analytics, Google Analytics and Meta Pixel, and 30 days of version history.

Business adds three things on top of Pro: automatic deletion of submissions after a retention period you choose per form, email verification for respondents (a 6-digit code sent to their address), and 90 days of version history. The pricing page says more Business features are coming. Tally does not list an Enterprise plan.

Students, teachers and non-profits can apply for 30% off Pro, which makes it $20 a month or $203 a year. The education discount lasts one year and the non-profit discount has no end date; both are for first-time Pro customers. There is no free trial, and the refund policy says Tally does not refund late cancellations, unused time or a change of mind, only a prolonged outage that stops you using the service. Cancelling keeps paid features until the end of the billing period.

File uploads and spam protection

File uploads are free. On the free plan each file can be up to 10 MB; Pro and Business remove the per-file limit. Tally says there is no limit on the number of files and no storage cap beyond the fair use policy. You can require uploads, allow several files with a minimum and maximum count, and restrict file types. Files are kept as long as the account and the response exist. Viewing them in Tally needs a login, and files sent to integrations such as Google Sheets carry a link with an access token, so anyone who can see that sheet can open the file. In notification emails, uploads appear as links rather than attachments.

Spam protection is thin by comparison. The help center documents one tool: a reCAPTCHA v2 block, free on every plan, that you add to the form yourself (Tally recommends placing it right above the submit button on multi-page forms so it doesn't expire). Tally says respondents only see a challenge when suspicious activity is detected. Tally's pages don't describe a honeypot or automatic spam filtering for submissions. Related controls exist: duplicate prevention on a field of your choice, password-protected forms, closing a form after a number of submissions, and, on Business, email verification.

Integrations, webhooks and the API

Integrations are free. Tally lists direct integrations with Google Sheets, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Slack, Discord, Linear and Attio, automation through Zapier, Make, n8n, IFTTT, Pipedream and others, and an MCP server, a Claude connector and a ChatGPT plugin. Google Analytics and Meta Pixel tracking are Pro features. Each integration has a sync log you can check when something stops arriving.

Webhooks are available to all Tally users. Each new submission is sent as a JSON POST with an event ID, the form and submission IDs and every field's key, label, type and value. You can add a signing secret, which adds a Tally-Signature header (the docs' example verifies it as a base64 HMAC-SHA256 of the payload), and custom HTTP headers. Your endpoint must return a 2XX status within 10 seconds. Failed deliveries are retried up to five times, after 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours and 1 day, and if all of them fail the form owner gets one email. You can connect any number of webhook URLs and see an events log for each.

The Tally API is also free. It uses bearer-token authentication at api.tally.so, is limited to 100 requests a minute, and is versioned by date. It can create, update and delete forms, list, fetch and delete submissions, and read form analytics, but it cannot submit a response on a respondent's behalf.

Data location, GDPR and privacy

Tally is an EU company and keeps form data in Europe. Its GDPR page says Tally is based in Belgium, complies with GDPR, encrypts all form data in transit and at rest, and stores it in Europe. The subprocessor list on the same page shows hosting and storage on Google Cloud in Belgium and file-upload storage on Cloudflare in the EU. Some opt-in features send form data to US providers: SendGrid for email notifications and Stripe for payment forms. Analytics, error monitoring and support tools are listed as not processing form submissions.

For form data, the form creator is the controller and Tally is the processor. Professional users accept Tally's Data Processing Agreement when they accept the terms, so there is nothing separate to sign. Submissions stay until you delete them. Deleted submissions sit in the Trash for 90 days, and Tally says deleted data is removed from backups within 90 days. Automatic deletion after a set period is a Business feature.

For your own account data, the privacy notice (version 1.0, September 9, 2024) names Tally BV in Ghent as controller, keeps account data for 90 days after you delete your profile, payment data for seven years and usage data for two years, and says Tally does not sell personal data. Belgian law applies, with the courts of Ghent, and complaints can go to the Belgian Data Protection Authority.

Tally vs Typeform and Tally vs Jotform

Most people comparing Tally are choosing between hosted builders, and Tally's pitch against both rivals is the free plan. Tally's own comparison pages say Typeform's free plan caps you at 10 responses a month, and that Jotform's free plan allows 5 forms and 100 submissions a month, while Tally's free plan has no cap on either. Those are Tally's claims about its competitors, so check them on Typeform's and Jotform's own pricing pages before deciding.

Where Tally is weaker is anything beyond the form itself. Tally's spam tooling is a single reCAPTCHA block, its payment block works through Stripe, it publishes no security certifications, and its free uploads stop at 10 MB per file; Tally's own Jotform page lists Jotform's free plan at 1 GB per submission. For a one-question-per-page layout, Tally's FAQ says to build a multi-page form with a page break after each question. Our Tally vs Typeform and Tally vs Jotform comparisons go through the differences in detail.

When a plain HTML form and a backend fit better

If you already have a website and a designed form, or you want the form to be ordinary markup on your page with your own CSS, analytics and domain, you don't need a builder. You need an endpoint for the form's action attribute. That is what a form backend like splitforms does, and Tally doesn't: there is no Tally URL you can POST your own form to.

splitforms is that kind of backend. Free is 500 submissions in total (one-time, no card), Pro is $5/month for 5,000 a month and Annual is $49/year for 15,000 a month. Owner email notifications and rule-based spam filtering are included on every plan, Free too, and submissions stay in a searchable dashboard with no automatic expiry. File uploads (5 files of 5 MB each per submission) and HMAC-signed webhooks come with paid plans.

Tally has the advantage in several places, and they are worth weighing honestly. It has unlimited free submissions, a visual builder with free conditional logic and payments, and webhooks on Free. If EU data residency is a requirement, Tally stores data in Europe, while splitforms stores submissions in the US under a DPA with standard contractual clauses. For a non-technical team that just needs a good form link, Tally is the simpler choice.