Introducing the Formaly SDK: Survey Your Users, Inside Your Product

Today we are shipping the Formaly SDK.

It is a small JavaScript file (under 10KB minified) that you add to your product once and then never have to touch again. From that point on, you configure everything in the Formaly dashboard: which survey to show, when to show it, who to show it to, and how it appears on screen.

No redeploys for survey changes. No email campaigns. No hoping that the right user opens the right inbox at the right time. The survey finds them, where they already are, at the moment that matters.

The honest reason we built this

I have been building Formaly for a while now. We have a good product: AI-generated surveys, a conversational chat mode, solid analytics. Teams use us to collect user research, NPS, CSAT, onboarding feedback, and more.

But there was a pattern I kept noticing: users would create a survey, share a link, and then wait. The link would go out in a Slack message, or a newsletter, or an onboarding email. Some responses would trickle in. Usually not enough.

The problem was the gap between the experience and the question. You upgraded a user to a paid plan; great, now wait for them to open an email and fill out a form. You shipped a new feature; great, hope they remember to fill out that survey you sent last Tuesday. The feedback was always from memory, always filtered through whatever mood the user was in when they happened to check their inbox.

In-product surveys close that gap. Ask the question at the moment the thing happened. The user just used the feature; ask now. They just hit an error; ask now. They just churned; ask now. That is the only version of this conversation worth having.

Tools like Pendo and Intercom have this. Formbricks has it as an open-source product. But I wanted Formaly to have it too, built on top of the same AI survey engine, the same analytics, the same editor, just delivered directly inside your product instead of via a link.

So we built it.

How it works: the 60-second version

Add the script tag. Initialize with your API key. Call Formaly.identify() with your user's attributes. Done.

<!-- 1. Add to your layout, once -->
<script src="https://formaly.io/formaly-sdk.js" defer></script>

<script>
  // 2. Initialize with your API key
  Formaly.init({ apiKey: "fml_YOUR_KEY_HERE" });

  // 3. Identify your user (call this after login)
  Formaly.identify({
    userId:     currentUser.id,
    plan:       currentUser.plan,        // "free" | "pro" | "enterprise"
    daysActive: currentUser.daysActive,
    role:       currentUser.role,
  });
</script>

From here, everything else happens in the Formaly dashboard. You create a survey, configure its targeting rules (when it shows, who it shows to, how it appears) and save. The SDK picks up the config on the next page load and handles the rest.

If you want to trigger a survey manually from your own application logic:

// Show after a specific user action
async function handleFeatureActivated() {
  await activateFeature();
  Formaly.show("your-survey-id");
}

// Listen for completions
Formaly.on("complete", ({ surveyId }) => {
  analytics.track("Survey Completed", { surveyId });
});

What is in the box

Five real scenarios and how to configure them

Abstract descriptions of triggers and conditions are useful to a point. Here is what the SDK actually looks like applied to real product feedback moments.

All configuration lives in the dashboard

One of the design decisions I am most happy with: you never have to touch your codebase to change a survey's targeting rules. The SDK fetches the current config on every page load. You update the rules in the editor, save, and they are live.

This matters for teams. The engineer who installs the SDK and the product manager who owns the feedback program are probably not the same person. Once the SDK is installed, the PM can run the entire survey operation from the dashboard (creating surveys, configuring targeting, adjusting cooldowns, reading results) without filing a single ticket.

What makes this different from Intercom or Pendo surveys

Fair question. Intercom has in-app surveys. Pendo has in-app guides with survey overlays. They work. They are also attached to expensive platform subscriptions that bundle a lot of things you may not need.

The Formaly SDK is specifically designed around survey quality, not around messaging, engagement scoring, or product analytics. The surveys you create in Formaly are AI-generated, conversational, and backed by the same analytics engine that runs sentiment analysis, completion funnels, QC checks, and cross-tab breakdowns on every response.

You are not getting a survey bolt-on to a platform. You are getting a purpose-built feedback tool that now has a delivery mechanism that meets users where they are.

Size, performance, and what it does not do

The SDK is 9.8KB minified. It makes one network request on init: a single fetch to GET /api/sdk/surveys that returns only the surveys relevant to your API key with targeting rules. No polling, no WebSocket, no persistent connection. After that, all logic runs locally.

Surveys render in an iframe loaded from formaly.io/embed/[id]. This means the survey content is served from our infrastructure, not yours, and survey updates (question edits, theme changes) are reflected immediately without any involvement from your application.

It does not track users beyond the survey interaction. It does not send analytics events. It does not set any cookies. Everything it stores goes into localStorage under keys prefixed with fml_: one key per survey to track when it was last shown, one to mark completion. That is the full extent of its storage footprint.

What is coming next

This is version one. It covers the most common targeting patterns and display formats. Here is what we are building toward:

If there is something specific you need that is not listed here, reach out. The roadmap is built from what teams actually ask for.

Go ship a survey

Email surveys are not going away. They still have a place, especially for surveys sent to non-users, or follow-ups weeks after an event. But for the moments that matter most (the upgrade, the first week, the feature adoption, the near-churn), in-product surveys win on every metric.

Response rate. Response quality. Time-to-insight. The context-aware question asked at the right moment, to the right user, in the right format, will always beat the email that lands two days later and competes with twelve other messages in an inbox.

The SDK is live. The install takes five minutes. Go collect some feedback worth having.