Date: 2023-05-09
Approved
The previous pricing structure for GOV.UK Forms, documented in DR002, stated that there would be no charges for using GOV.UK Forms for government services with less than 10,000 transactions per year. We committed to this for the duration of private beta and advised partners we would notify them 3 months in advance of any planned changes. This created uncertainty amongst partners who were planning whether or not to adopt GOV.UK Forms for their long term form building needs. We also needed to decide and communicate to our partners any charges that would apply to forms with over 10,000 transactions.
We drafted several pricing options and presented these to the senior management team for review. On April 6, 2023, we received confirmation that GOV.UK Forms would become completely free for all users regardless of number of created forms or form submissions.
We will have no charges to departments and our partners for using GOV.UK Forms. There will be no cost for hosting any number of forms created on the platform or for form submissions.
We have also changed the amount of time we’ll inform our partners of any changes to our pricing structure from 3 months to 6 months.
Offering GOV.UK Forms at no cost helps to reduce the barriers to lower volume services using GOV.UK Forms that would otherwise require significant procurement effort. This will help drive greater digitisation of government services and promote channel shift, saving money and time for our users.
Negative consequence:
We recognise that the decision not to charge for any forms or submissions presents a risk of larger volume services using GOV.UK Forms when a full digital service rather than just a form is required. Higher volume services which handle more than 10,000 transactions per year may be required to undergo a service assessment. It is not within the scope of GOV.UK Forms to ensure that such services have undergone a service assessment. If such cases arise, we will refer them to the DDaT profession leads of their respective departments to assist them in deciding what to do.