1. This is a profit-driven company that has prioritised growth and AI experimentation over stability, integrity, and user trust. It has repeatedly placed the burden of its own platform’s failures on paying customers, while stripping back support and accountability. For anyone considering using JotForm for serious business or mission-critical applications, I would strongly advise you reconsider. It is not a safe or reliable tool, and its support infrastructure—whether staffed by humans or bots—is not equipped to handle real-world issues with urgency or care.2. The broader issue is systemic. JotForm has adopted a business model that is, quite frankly, extractive. It draws in users through features it no longer reliably delivers, and once locked in—via the extensive time and infrastructure required to build forms and apps within their ecosystem—it becomes extremely difficult to leave. Migrating to another platform is made intentionally burdensome, opaque, and costly. And for many, that cost is not just technical but reputational—particularly when campaigns, charities, or client communications depend on forms that JotForm cannot safeguard or recover.3. In my case - I’m sharing this as a long-term, paid subscriber to JotForm—three consecutive years, paid annually in advance—who has now lost complete trust in the platform following a critical failure that caused the deletion of a live form connected to a paid advertising campaign for a charity initiative. Immediately after deleting a single submission from the form, the entire form disappeared from my dashboard. It was not in Trash, Archive, or any other folder, and became inaccessible despite having been active moments earlier. Crucially, I did not delete the form itself—only a test submission. This is not the first time I’ve experienced this issue, which I now believe to be a recurring glitch linked to JotForm’s backend logic for managing linked content and deletion events.4. Rather than acknowledge the technical fault, support repeatedly insisted it was retrievable from Trash—even after I had clearly explained, and provided screenshots demonstrating, that the Trash folder was empty. Over a period of 12 hours, I was bounced between multiple agents, most of whom gave copy-pasted responses or asked me to repeat troubleshooting steps I had already undertaken and documented. Despite one agent being able to see the form on their end, no action was taken to restore it, and it was only after escalation that a developer ticket was raised—by which point, I had already lost most of the value of my campaign.5. One of the only reasons I chose JotForm was its advertised promise of live support. That promise was central to my purchase decision, and I believe the platform has materially misrepresented its offering. Live support has now been functionally replaced by a slow, circular AI triage system that pushes responsibility back onto the user, even in cases of systemic failure. The fact that a known, platform-level bug can result in permanent deletion of user content—with no reliable recovery mechanism—is unacceptable for any professional-grade form service, and catastrophic for users running public-facing or time-sensitive campaigns.6. The most concerning aspect, however, is not just technical, but also commercial in nature: JotForm continues to advertise features like live support at the point of sale, but then covertly revokes and downgrades those services after payment, binding users to a platform that becomes increasingly unfit for purpose. Under Australian Consumer Law, this could constitute misleading or deceptive conduct (s18) and false or misleading representation about services (s29), especially given the centrality of “live human support” in their sales material. The platform’s refusal to address these failures or refund subscriptions following breach of these guarantees may also breach s60–61, which require services to be rendered with due care and skill and to be fit for the purpose disclosed.7. I have now requested a full refund for my annual subscription and will be migrating all forms to a more transparent and better-supported platform. The task I now face is further infuriating and costly in terms of time and business resources, as JotForm has made it deliberately onerous to export or migrate data, adding insult to injury for paying users rights to their own intellectual property.
