Your submissions are already being kept, and that cuts both ways
Gravity Forms writes every entry to its own tables before it tries to send anything, which 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.
Feeds are the feature people are paying for and not using
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. This is usually the highest-value hour anyone spends on a Gravity Forms site, and it almost never requires a new plugin.
Which licence tier you need, honestly
The add-ons are split across licence tiers, and the tier you need is decided by one or two specific add-ons rather than 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.
Conditional logic belongs on more than fields
Most sites use conditional logic to show and hide fields and stop there. It also applies to notifications, to confirmations and to feeds, which is 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near-identical forms into one that behaves four ways removes the maintenance problem where three of them silently fall out of date.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 a custom field or hook beats another add-on
Gravity Forms has a deep hook layer and a documented API, so a requirement that does not match any add-on 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.
Entries are personal data sitting in your database
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 a Gravity Forms page gets slow
Gravity Forms itself is not heavy, but three things make it feel that way: 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.
What this costs
Single pieces of work — a feed configured, a form rebuilt with proper conditional logic, a custom validation rule, a retention policy set up — start at $300 and are fixed-quoted once we know the requirement. If something is misbehaving and you want it identified and written down, that is $249. Ongoing work is $165 an hour, or $750 for five hours and $1,400 for ten, which is how most people with more than one form buy it.
