In early 2025 we got asked to help run a charity dance fitness day for Holly Hedge Animal Sanctuary. People needed to pick which classes they wanted to book into; seemed simple enough! I figured it'd take a few minutes to find the right tool, but it didn't. Most event managers wanted a cut of every ticket, which felt mad for a charity fundraiser. The free form builders couldn't handle per-session capacity or live spot counters, so you'd end up overbooking a class. The "proper" event platforms were built for conferences with badge printing and seating charts, definitely not a village hall fundraiser where someone's mum is checking people in with a clipboard.
Most of what I tried was either too pricey for a small event or too generic to handle multi-session bookings without a load of manual workarounds. So I built one. Just for that event, originally. It needed to let people pick sessions, count spots in real time, send a confirmation email, and not eat into the money the charity was actually trying to raise. The event ran and the form worked; the sanctuary got its donations.
I kept thinking about how many other people might be in the same spot: The village fete committee, the dance instructor running a taster day, the bloke at the pub doing a charity quiz night. They don't have a tech budget, and they're not going to sit through a 40-minute tutorial to learn the other softwares. They just need a link they can stick on Facebook. Multi-session bookings were the original use case, but most events are simpler. A single ticket with maybe an adult/child/concession split, or a free signup form for a community meeting where you just need names. So FormVillage ended up with three distinct event types instead of trying to bend one form to fit everything.
Pricing was the other thing I got wrong first time round. I started with a subscription because that's what every SaaS does, but it didn't fit the audience. A village fete happens once a year. Asking someone to commit to 15/month so they can run one summer fundraiser is daft. So credits came in: pay 3, run a form, done. Subscriptions are still there for clubs and instructors running stuff regularly, but they're not the default anymore (because not everyone wants to be locked in for a month!).
It's not better than the alternatives at everything (yet!). What FormVillage does is the specific job of getting a small community event online in about ten minutes, without losing 5% of every ticket to a platform fee. That's the gap I kept falling into and couldn't fill with anything off the shelf, so I made the thing I'd been looking for.
