We cut our AI quotas: here's why

The numbers, up front

As of today, YeetForm's monthly AI build limits changed:

• Free: 20 → 5
• Pro: 300 → 100
• Scale: 1500 → 400

Lifetime stays matched to Pro, so it also moves to 100. If you're on Free and you've used 6 AI builds this month before this post existed, nothing retroactively breaks, but going forward the ceiling is lower. I'd rather tell you why than let you find out from a usage bar quietly capping out.

What a "build" actually counts

Before the why, the what, because "AI build" was always a little vague and that vagueness is part of what got me here. A build is any of these:

• Generate: the initial "describe your form" call that creates the fields, validation, and logic from a plain-language prompt.
• Refine by chat: every message you send the form-editing agent to add a field, tweak logic, or change copy. Not one build per session, one per message that makes the AI actually call the model.
• Translate: generating translations for a form into a new language.
• Analyze: chatting with your response data to ask questions about what came in.

Four different features, one shared meter, because they all cost me the same thing on the back end: a call to Claude.

The unit economics, honestly

Each of those calls costs YeetForm roughly €0.05 in model usage. That's not nothing, and it's not scary on its own, the problem is what happens when you multiply it by a generous quota and a low price.

Pro was €19 a month for 300 AI builds. Run the math: 300 builds × €0.05 is €15 in raw model cost alone, before Anthropic API overhead variance, before Stripe's cut, before hosting, before the fact that a real user who pays for a form tool tends to use the thing they're paying for. €19 in, potentially €15+ straight back out the door on the AI cost line alone, on a product that also has to cover its database, file storage, email sending, and my own runway. That's not a healthy margin, that's underwater with the tide coming in. Scale's 1500 builds for €49 was the same problem at a bigger scale: 1500 × €0.05 is €75 in cost against €49 of revenue, and that's before anything else.

I set those original numbers early, before I had real usage data, and I set them the way most people set numbers before they have data: generously, because generous sounds good and nobody wants to be the founder who nickel-and-dimes the free tier on day one. But generous-before-you-know-your costs is just a delayed bill. Better to send it now, honestly, than to quietly nerf the product later or fold under the weight of it.

What did NOT change

This is the part I actually want to be loud about, because it would have been easy to solve the margin problem by putting logic and branching behind a paywall instead, and I decided not to.

• Forms, responses, and logic are still free, on every plan, including Free. Conditional show/hide, multi-page branching, calculated fields, none of that touches the AI meter, because none of it calls a model. Build every field by hand and the quota never moves.
• The free plan still exists, with no card required. 5 AI builds a month is enough to generate a form and refine it a few times, which covers a real one-off use case: the bakery feedback form, the workshop RSVP, the thing you need once and don't need to iterate on forever.
• Nothing about the editor, the field types, the integrations, or the API changed. This was a quota adjustment on four AI-calling actions, not a product cut.

The reasoning: AI is the expensive, optional accelerant. The form builder underneath it is the actual product, and it was never going to be the thing I gated to fix a margin problem I created myself. If you never touch the AI at all, you can run YeetForm entirely for free, forever, with unlimited forms and unlimited responses, and never see this limit.

I also looked at the obvious alternative, raising prices instead of cutting quota, and decided against it for now. Raising the price on Pro doesn't fix a per-unit cost problem, it just moves the same underwater math to a higher number and asks existing customers to fund it. Fixing the quota fixes the actual thing that was broken: how much AI cost sat behind each euro of revenue.

If you need more room

If 5 a month on Free feels tight, the honest options are the same three that were always there. Pricing has Pro at €19/month or €190/year for 100 builds, Scale at €49/month or €490/year for 400 builds and 3 seats, both with a 14-day free trial, card required but nothing charged until the trial ends. If you'd rather pay once and stop thinking about it, the Lifetime plan is €99 one-time for Pro-equivalent limits forever, no renewal, no expiry. It's aimed squarely at people who've decided they're keeping this tool and don't want a recurring line item for a form builder.

Why post this at all

Because building in public means posting the boring, slightly uncomfortable adjustments too, not just the launch announcements. Cutting a number that's visible on a pricing page is a worse feeling than shipping a new feature, but it's the more honest one: I'd rather run a product whose numbers make sense than one that looks generous until the bill comes due.

If the new limits change how you use YeetForm, tell me. I'm one person reading the feedback, not a support queue.