A Google Forms alternative when you've outgrown it

Let's be clear up front: Google Forms is free, unlimited, and completely fine for most things people use it for. Party RSVPs, class surveys, quick office polls — make the form, share the link, watch answers land in a Sheet. If that's your situation, keep using it.

This post is for the moment you hit one of its actual walls:

• Every form looks like a Google Form. You can change the header image and a color; the rest is recognizably Google.
• Scoring stops at "quiz mode." Right/wrong answers with a total, but no outcome buckets — no "score 0–3 gets this result page, 4+ gets redirected to book a call."
• No webhooks without Apps Script. Getting a submission into your CRM, Slack, or backend means writing and babysitting a script.
• No API-first workflow. The form lives in an editor; its definition isn't a file you can version, diff, or generate.
• No AI-assistant integration. You can't ask Claude or ChatGPT to build the form and hand you a live link.

What QuizGen does differently

QuizGen is a headless quiz/form service: the form is a JSON definition, and you (or an AI assistant) POST it to get back a live hosted link like quizgen.dev/q/x7km2p — mobile-friendly, autosaving, no account needed for respondents. Point Claude or ChatGPT at quizgen.dev/llms.txt (or add the MCP server at quizgen.dev/mcp), describe the form in a sentence, and get the link back in chat.

The parts Google Forms makes hard are built in:

• Scored outcomes with buckets. An outcomes block maps answers to points and points to result buckets — each bucket gets its own title, body, and optional redirect_url. That's a lead-qualification form that scores itself, no add-ons.
• Real webhooks. Set a URL and a secret, and every completed response POSTs to your endpoint with an HMAC-SHA256 signature (X-QuizGen-Signature) you verify before trusting the payload. Details in quiz response webhooks.
• Response caps and close dates. max_responses and close_at in settings — the form closes itself.
• Definitions as JSON. The form is a document you can keep in your repo, review in a PR, and regenerate on demand.

The Apps Script test

Here's a quick self-diagnostic: have you ever opened the Apps Script editor to get form submissions somewhere — a Slack ping, a CRM row, a POST to your own server? Then you've already built a webhook by hand, minus the retries, the signature, and the part where it keeps working after you forget it exists. A webhook with an HMAC signature is that script, as a product feature.

Stay or switch

Stay with Google Forms if: you want free and unlimited, your answers belong in a spreadsheet anyway, and everyone involved already knows how it works. Those are real advantages — Sheets integration and familiarity are hard to beat, and QuizGen's free tier is 3 live quizzes with 100 answers each per month, not unlimited.

Switch if: the form is part of a funnel (scoring, outcomes, redirects), part of a system (webhooks, JSON definitions, API), or something you'd rather describe to an AI assistant than click together.

The whole build step

curl -X POST https://quizgen.dev/api/v1/quizzes \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{ "schema_version": 1, "title": "Coffee or tea?",
    "sections": [ { "key": "main", "questions": [
      { "id": "pick", "type": "choice", "prompt": "Coffee or tea?",
        "options": [ { "value": "coffee", "label": "Coffee" },
                     { "value": "tea", "label": "Tea" } ] } ] } ] }'

That returns a live URL. No Authorization header makes it a 72-hour sandbox preview capped at 10 responses; sign up free at quizgen.dev/login to keep quizzes and read responses back.

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Full docs, one file: quizgen.dev/llms.txt.