Where do Gravity Forms submissions go?
Every submission goes into Gravity Forms' own database tables before it tries to send anything, and that is the single best reason to be on it: an email that bounces, gets filtered or is sent to a staff address that no longer exists costs you nothing, because the enquiry is still sitting in the site. The other half of that fact is less comfortable. Those entries are personal information, they accumulate indefinitely by default, and on most sites nobody has ever set a retention policy or checked who can read them. Both halves are worth acting on and the second one is rarely mentioned until something goes wrong.
What are feeds, and why is nobody using them?
A feed is what happens after a submission (take payment, create the CRM record, fire the webhook, add them to the mailing list) and it can be conditional, so a form can behave differently depending on what was filled in. Most of the manual copying between a form notification and some other system that a staff member does every morning is a feed that was never configured. Setting up that Gravity Forms integration is usually the highest-value hour anyone spends on the site, and it almost never requires a new plugin.
Which Gravity Forms licence tier do you need?
The tier you need is decided by one or two specific add-ons, not by the size of your business, which is not how it is usually sold. Payments and the common marketing integrations sit lower than people expect; a handful of the automation and advanced add-ons are what actually push you up. We will tell you which tier your requirement lands in before you renew, including when the honest answer is that a lower tier plus twenty minutes of custom code does the same job permanently.
Where should conditional logic be used?
On notifications, confirmations and feeds as well as fields, although most sites only ever use it to show and hide fields. The other three are where it stops being cosmetic: one form can route to different departments, send a different confirmation, and only charge a card when a particular option was chosen. Rebuilding four near-identical forms into one that behaves four ways removes the maintenance problem where three of them silently fall out of date.
When does custom code beat another add-on?
When you need one behaviour that no add-on provides cleanly. Gravity Forms has a deep hook layer and a documented API, so that kind of requirement is usually a small piece of code rather than a dead end: a validation rule, a calculated value, a field type that behaves the way your business actually works. That code lives in your child theme or a small site plugin, has no licence, and does not stop working because a vendor lost interest. We reach for it when the alternative is a third-party add-on bought for one feature.
Are form entries personal data?
Yes. Under Australian privacy law the enquiries in your forms table are your responsibility, and the default position on most sites is that they are kept forever, readable by everyone with an editor account, and included in every database backup that leaves the building. Setting a retention period, restricting who can read entries, and knowing how to export or delete one person's data on request are all straightforward to configure and almost never configured. It also keeps the table from growing into a performance problem on older sites.
Why is our Gravity Forms page slow?
Usually one of three things rather than the plugin's own weight, because Gravity Forms itself is not heavy: a long multi-page form doing calculations on every keystroke, dynamic population pulling from a large data source on page load, and a form embedded on a page that is cached everywhere except for the form. Each has a different fix and only one of them is about the plugin. We would rather find which of the three it is than tell you to replace the plugin.
How much does a Gravity Forms developer cost?
A single Gravity Forms job: one feed configured, a form rebuilt around proper conditional logic, a custom validation rule, a retention policy put in place: starts at $300, with a fixed price agreed once the requirement is clear. When something is misbehaving and you first want the cause found and written up, the diagnostic is $249. Businesses that hire a Gravity Forms expert for a run of changes across several forms usually prepay: $500 covers five hours and $1,000 covers ten, against $100 for an hour bought on its own.
