Feature lists are written for the plan matrix, not for you. A tool can claim conditional logic, webhooks and team access on its home page while placing each of them on a different tier, so the version you tried is not the version described.
Here is where the walls usually sit, and how to spot them before you have rebuilt your form.
The features most often reserved for higher tiers
Conditional logic. The most common upsell in the category, and the one that changes what a form can do at all. Sometimes the free plan gets show-and-hide rules while real branching is two tiers up; sometimes logic is present but limited to a handful of rules per form.
Webhooks and integrations. Collecting a response is cheap; delivering it somewhere is what the business runs on, so this is where tiers cluster. Watch for integrations sold individually as paid add-ons on top of an already-paid plan.
Removing the vendor’s branding. A footer badge on a form you send to customers is a marketing channel you are funding. Fair enough on a free plan. Less fair when it survives into a paid one.
Two-factor authentication and audit logs. Security as an upsell is the one that should bother you, because the person exposed is not the one choosing the plan. A form account holds other people’s answers.
Team access. Usually genuine. A second seat costs the vendor a second seat. But check whether “team” means shared editing or merely a shared invoice, and whether the price is per person or per plan.
How to check a plan matrix in ten minutes
- Open the pricing page and the feature comparison table side by side. The table always says more than the cards.
- Find the feature you actually came for and note the cheapest plan that has it in full. Ignore every other row.
- Search the docs for that feature’s page and look for the words “available on”. The docs are updated more honestly than the marketing pages.
- Build the real form on the free plan before paying. Not a test form: the real one, with the branching and the integration.
- Check whether the paid feature is monthly-billable. A feature that exists only on annual plans is a twelve-month commitment wearing a feature’s clothes.
What Questionful gates, stated plainly
Two things, and no others.
AI generation needs a paid plan. It costs us money per draft, so it is metered by the plan rather than given away.
Shared team workspaces need the Teams plan, which covers three people and adds €10 a month for each person beyond that.
Everything else is on the free plan: all 19 question types except file upload, per-answer branching, quiz scoring with per-answer feedback, webhooks, Zapier, Make, Google Drive, two-factor authentication, and the activity log. Respondent file uploads need a paid plan because they need storage: 2 GB on Standard, 5 GB on Teams, 25 MB per file.
Security is not a tier here. Two-factor authentication and the activity log are on every account, including the free one.
The features we do not have at any price
Worth being equally plain about, because a paywall you cannot climb is not the only kind of disappointment:
- No public API, OAuth provider or JavaScript SDK yet.
- No payments, calculated fields, answer piping or hidden fields.
- No custom domains, white-labelling or custom CSS.
- No quotas, and no form importer.
If your decision depends on one of those, the honest answer is that another tool is a better fit today. The comparison pages say which one, competitor by competitor.
The short version
- Logic, webhooks, branding removal and 2FA are the four usual walls.
- Read the comparison table, not the plan cards.
- Build the real form on the free plan before you pay for anything.
- Treat security behind a paywall as a signal about the vendor, not a feature decision.
- On Questionful only AI generation, team workspaces and respondent file uploads depend on the plan. See pricing.