6 years in, $6 million far

Our bootstrapped form builder, Tally, just crossed $6M ARR, and 2.5 million users. As the tradition goes, here's a summary of what happened since our last update.

If you're new here, this is a recap of our journey building Tally:

It's hard not to get a bit emotional while writing this post.

Maybe because I'm writing it after a four week break, spent together with Filip (my partner and co-founder) and the kids. Four weeks of almost no work, slowing down, and enjoying being with the family. It still feels surreal that we can do this, now for the second year in a row. Six years ago I wouldn't have believed you if you told me we'd build a product-led business that keeps growing on its own, with a team of 10 people (including us), and that we'd be able to step away for a month.

It's the result of hiring people you trust, writing things down, and letting go. If the business only works when you're watching, you built a product, not a company. It's something we've been working towards for six years. And we very well realize we’re not there yet.

Somehow, building a business always meant working non-stop towards the moment of truth: the sale. That's the script. You build, you grow, you exit.

But what if it doesn't need to be that way? What if we actually built something that could last? Something we enjoy running, that doesn't need to be sold to be considered a success?

Having kids makes you reflect on the example you set, and on what's actually important in life (at least for me). One day they'll be old enough to understand what we do. For now, it's just “typing on computers” and having a "flower" as a logo. How do you explain this to a 3 and a 6 year old? Your parents were indie hackers, your dad builds computer programs, and your mom writes on the internet?

Maybe the answer boils down to this: we're doing something we love as a job, we built something, from nothing, and we have the freedom to make our own choices.

And maybe that's the ultimate dream.

Anyway, enough of the personal sidetrack. As always, here's what happened on the road from 5 to 6. And this time, it was a rocky one.

The hardest week: a data breach

Let's start with the low point. In early August, we were notified that Metabase, a third-party analytics tool we used internally, had been compromised through a zero-day vulnerability. Tally wasn't the only company affected, but that doesn't make it any less painful: email addresses and hashed passwords of Tally accounts were extracted. Data that didn't need to be accessible through Metabase in the first place. That's on us. No Tally accounts or form data was accessed at any point.

This was the first data breach we've ever experienced. It was stressful, and humbling. Because you realize the scale of what we’re building, and that it can also all be over, just like that.

We emailed our entire user base right away and shared, in full transparency, what happened. What came next surprised me. We received thousands of replies. Of course there were questions and valid concerns, but most of them were supportive:

"As a software founder, I completely understand that these things happen. But I love the way you handled it"

"I've been a Tally fan since finding out about it years ago and I have to say your email made me respect you and your team even more."

"It's astonishing how rare it is for a company (or their leadership) to own an issue and articulate so clearly and factually the issue. [...] Well done. Proudly continuing to support Tally"

Thank you to everyone who took the time to write us. You have no idea how much those emails touched us. And to those affected: again, our sincerest apologies that this happened.

We didn't stop at apologizing. Metabase is gone: we removed it entirely and built our own internal stats instead, so account data never leaves our own systems again. We took a hard look at every other third-party tool, and are going through ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification, expected by the end of this year.

If this stretch taught us anything, it's this: what carried us through wasn't a crisis playbook, it was six years of being open with our users. Trust is built in the quiet years and spent in the hard weeks. We intend to keep earning it.

Community, in real life

On a much happier note: this is the year "building community" stopped being a Slack channel and became something you could shake hands with.

Ward kickstarted our first Tally meetups, and in June we hosted our first Tally-organized one in London, at Ramen Space, the co-working community that Charlie (a long-time Tally user) runs in Dalston. Meeting Charlie and a room full of Tally users in person was one of the highlights of my year so far.

After years of building a remote product for people all over the world, there's something special about pizza, name tags, and someone telling you in person that a form builder changed how they work. More meetups are in the works, hope to catch you at one of them!

The AI section (you knew it was coming)

Rolling out Tally AI

We're not turning Tally into an AI form builder. The goal stays the same: make the tedious parts of form building disappear. But this was the period where AI quietly became part of how people build with Tally.

In August, we crossed 1 million AI tool calls in a single month (Tally AI and our MCP server combined). Tally AI went from 85K calls in April to 767K in August, as we gradually rolled it out to everyone. And our MCP server keeps growing as a way to build and analyze forms from tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

Today, 30% of forms created by new accounts are built with Tally AI. In full transparency, there has been some backlash too, users who don’t want us to join “the AI train”. But that’s why we feel strongly about keeping it optional and opt-in. You don’t have to use Tally AI, nothing changes in the form builder interface. But you can, if you want to. You don’t have to build forms with ChatGPT or Claude, but the option is there. And it’s getting better every day.

How AI is changing the way we work

It's not just the product. AI quietly changed how this team of 10 operates, and we feel it more every month. Some examples:

The team writes code with a mix of Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Every pull request now gets a first review from filip[bot], a Claude-powered reviewer. It reviews every PR through 33 different lenses (security, performance, our own conventions...), and every finding it makes has to survive a second agent whose only job is to disprove it by running the actual tests. Only the findings that hold up get posted as comments. The result: about 81% of filip[bot]'s comments get acted on before merge, all before a human reviewer even opens the PR.

The same setup runs three health monitors: one watching Sentry errors, one watching Tally AI sessions, one watching the support inbox. When something breaks, they don't just alert us. They investigate, diagnose the root cause, and open a Notion ticket ready for triage.

Claude also joined our Slack. The support team tags it to dig up similar past cases, find the right help article to share, or research a specific GDPR question. Things that used to mean 20 minutes of searching. On the marketing side, we have skills that help draft our newsletter, update competitor comparison pages, and audit help center content, connected to the tools we use daily through MCP: Ahrefs, Promptwatch, Octolens, Missive, and Notion.

To be clear: none of this replaces anyone. AI gives us a head start. We still check, iterate, and decide. We never publish AI-generated content as-is, and we never push code to production without human eyes on it. But the head starts add up.

Growth in an LLM-driven world

In the last update, we shared that AI search had overtaken our viral loop as our biggest acquisition channel. That trend didn't just continue, it accelerated: today 43% of new users discover Tally through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and friends.

Some perspective on how wild that is. For five years, our growth loop was word of mouth plus the "Made with Tally" badge: someone fills out a form, sees the badge, signs up. That loop still runs, and about 1% of those signups eventually upgrade.

But since last year, AI recommendations have taken the number one spot, and the share keeps climbing. Our onboarding survey confirms it every week: more and more people tell us an AI assistant sent them. Some answers funnier than others.

We never bought this channel. Well, you can’t (yet). Despite the wild theories floating around online, this is a channel we don't fully control. Yes, we invest in AEO (and SEO): we track where LLMs mention and cite Tally, identify prompt gaps, audit our help center so the content stays accurate and helpful, and keep our comparison pages up to date. We listen to our users and to online conversations. But a model update could still reshuffle recommendations overnight. Which is exactly why we keep investing in the things that made Tally happen in the first place: the product, the free plan, and the community.

The team (trip)

We haven't left yet, but soon the whole team will be together in real life for the first time, in Marrakech, Morocco. With part of the team in Ghent and part fully remote, this will be the first time everyone shares a table instead of a Slack channel. Some of us have worked together for years without ever meeting in real life.

I revealed the destination through Tallymination, a guessing game I built with the help of Claude. It wasn't my finest work: the team guessed the destination in no time. But at least it sparked some laughs. I can't wait to finally meet everyone in person, and I'll share how the trip went in the next update.

Closing thoughts

Everyone is asking if AI will kill SaaS, Tally included. My honest take: I don’t know. What I do know is that I believe in opinionated, well-made products that respect your time. If anything, AI raises the bar for craft, brand, and community. Exactly the things that don't scale, and exactly the things small teams like ours happen to be good at.

We'll keep shipping, keep listening, and keep meeting you in real life. And we'll keep chasing a business we're proud to explain to a 3 and a 6 year old.

Marie 💙