Typeform AI Form Builder: A Quote Request Form for a Fencing Firm

Open Typeform, choose Create a new form and describe the fencing jobs you quote in one prompt: job type, style, length, gates, access, photos and contact details. Typeform AI drafts the questions and branching, you correct them, then add the photo upload (a paid-plan feature) and turn on email notifications for your estimator.

The AI draft is the quick part. What makes a quote form worth having is deciding what your estimator needs to price a fence without a first phone call, then testing every path on a phone before a customer sees it. The example here is an invented firm: two crews, garden fences and gates, one person answering the office phone.

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Plans matter more than usual in this build. Photo upload and partial responses are not on the Free plan, and a saved partial response from someone who gives up halfway counts towards the monthly response cap, so the plan section further down is worth reading before you design the form.

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Decide what the estimator needs before writing a prompt

A fence quote turns on a handful of facts. If the form collects them, the estimator can price most jobs from the desk and keep site visits for the ones that need them. If the form misses one, somebody phones the customer anyway, which is the call the form was supposed to save.

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I would leave out budget and the value of the property. Both make people hesitate, and neither changes what a fence costs to build. A fence is priced by its length, its ground and its gates, not by who is asking.

The prompt to paste into Typeform AI

Log in, click + Create a new form, type the prompt into the text field and press Enter. Typeform's own guidance on prompts is to tell the AI who it is, what the form is for, the tone, the question types you want, any features such as branching, and what to avoid. This is that framework filled in for the fencing firm.

You are a customer-service manager at a small fencing company that installs and repairs garden fences and gates for homeowners.
Create a quote request form of about 12 questions. The goal is to give our estimator enough detail to price most jobs without a first phone call.
Tone: friendly and plain, no jargon.
Start by asking what the customer needs: new fence, replacement, repair of a section, gate only, or not sure.
For new fences and replacements, ask for style, height and approximate length in metres, with a "not sure, please measure" option. For replacements, also ask what the old fence is made of, whether the posts are set in concrete, and who should take the old fence away.
Ask how many gates are needed and how wide.
Ask whether a van can park near the fence line, and about obstacles such as trees or steps.
Ask whether the fence is on a boundary shared with a neighbour.
After the job questions, ask for contact details (name, phone, email) and a consent checkbox to be contacted about this quote.
Then add three photo upload questions; only the first is required.
Finish by asking when they want the work done.
Add branching so each customer only sees the questions that apply to them.
Do not ask about budget or the value of the property. Keep every question under 15 words.

Two lines are there for a reason. "About 12 questions" is meant to stop the AI padding the form, and the "do not ask" line is meant to keep it off budget. If the first result is far off, Typeform's guidance is to break the request up: ask for the basic form first, then send separate follow-ups for logic, tone and wording.

The AI's edits land in a draft. View details shows what was added, removed or changed, Undo reverses the latest AI change, and on a form that is already live the changes wait until you click Publish edits. On the Free plan, Typeform's help page for Typeform AI caps messages at 40 a day, 70 a week and 100 a month, and says those caps apply only to Free accounts. That is plenty for one form, but worth knowing before you start experimenting.

The same page describes a Typeform AI memory: click the three dots in the chat field, choose Typeform AI memory, and add up to 2,000 characters about your business. Put the fence styles you install, the jobs you turn down and the tone you want there once, and every later prompt in the account starts from it. Keep prices out of it, because a quote form should never show the customer a number the estimator hasn't checked.

A first draft to expect, and what to change in it

The table shows the sort of draft a prompt like this can return. It is a constructed illustration, not a recording of one run: your result will differ in wording and order, and the AI may do better or worse on any single point. The "Fix" column is the useful part, because every draft needs a pass like this.

Five changes matter most. Delete the budget question. Give length as bands with a "not sure" choice, because a customer who can't measure will abandon a required number box. Move contact details up so they sit straight after the job questions and before the photos, as the prompt asked, which leaves room for a Partial Submit Point after them. Swap the consent Yes/No for a Legal question, which Typeform describes as a place for a legal note or disclaimer and which you can set to Required so nobody submits without agreeing. And repair the "gate only" route, which is where AI-built branching usually slips.

There is a sixth catch in the table. Typeform's Number question accepts positive whole numbers only, with no decimal points, so a customer can't type 1.2 for a gate width or 12.5 for a run. Offer length as bands (for example under 10 m, 10 to 20 m, 20 to 40 m, over 40 m, not sure) or ask for the nearest whole metre, and offer gate widths as choices (for example 0.9 m, 1.2 m, 3 m, other), or people will get stuck on the very first measurement.

Conditional questions: who sees what

Typeform calls this branching logic. Each rule reads "go to [destination] when [condition]", where the destination can be a question, a Question Group or an Ending. If several rules apply to one question, the first condition that is met triggers the jump and later rules are ignored for that person, so the order matters. You set branching in the desktop builder; it is not available in the mobile builder.

Two habits stop people falling into the wrong group. Put each branch's questions in their own Question Group, and on the last question of a group add an "always go to" rule that sends everyone on to the shared part of the form (van access, shared boundary, contact details, photos and timing). Without it, a gate-only customer who finishes the gate questions simply carries on into the replacement questions.

Typeform AI can create and edit branching rules too, so you can type "send people who choose Gate only to the gate questions and skip the fence questions" and see what it builds. Then open the Workflow tab, which shows the Logic Map, and trace every route with your finger. Typeform's branching article also recommends testing every answer path in Preview, and I would treat that as non-negotiable.

Photo upload: one question per photo, 10 MB each

The File Upload question is a Basic-plan feature and above. Typeform's File Upload article says it accepts any file type up to 10 MB, and that people on phones can either choose a photo from their library or take one with the camera. One question takes one file. For several photos, add a Question Group and put a separate File Upload question inside it for each.

Tell people exactly what to photograph, because "upload a photo of your fence" gets you a picture of one panel from two metres away. Wording that works for this firm:

• Photo 1 (required): "Stand at one end of the fence line and photograph the whole run, so we can see the length and any slope."
• Photo 2 (optional): "Photograph the old fence close up, including the bottom of a post if you can see it."
• Photo 3 (optional): "Photograph where the gate will go, with the ground on both sides."

Two cautions. First, storage: the plan comparison on Typeform's pricing page lists 1 GB of uploaded files on Basic, 2 GB on Plus and 4 GB from Business, and the help article says the limit is applied on a fair-use basis, so download photos into the job folder and don't treat Typeform as your archive. Second, privacy. If you send responses to an integration, a webhook, a follow-up message or a CSV export, Typeform creates a link to each uploaded file that anyone holding it can open. The links are long and hard to guess, but Typeform says to treat them as shareable. Customers' garden photos can show houses, cars and children's toys, so don't forward those links to anyone who doesn't need them.

Capturing a lead before the photo step loses people

Photos are the heaviest ask in the form. Some people will get that far, find the camera roll slow, and close the tab. A Partial Submit Point saves what they have already answered: when someone passes it, their earlier answers are recorded as a partial response, and you can filter results by Completed or Partial.

Partial responses need a Basic plan or higher, and Basic allows one Partial Submit Point. Place it directly after the contact details, make the question just before it required, and leave the photos and timing after it. It can't sit after the Welcome Screen or at the very end. One cost to plan for: every partial response counts towards your monthly response limit, and if someone passes the point and later comes back to submit in a separate browser session, Typeform counts two responses.

One conflict to check before you rely on this. The help article on partial responses says a Partial Submit Point can sit before, after or inside a branch, but the plan comparison on Typeform's pricing page says that using partial responses on forms with logic or scoring needs one of its Growth plans. This form depends on branching, so publish it on your own plan, run the abandon test in the testing table below, and confirm a Partial response actually appears in Results. If it doesn't, an abandoned form saves nothing at all, so lower the barrier instead: make every photo optional, and add a line on the photo question saying the customer can text photos later to the number on your site.

When it works, it gives the firm a number to chase. A partial response with a phone number and "gate only" or "repair a section" is a lead worth a quick call, since those jobs rarely need photos to price.

Getting each request to the estimator

The built-in route is a setting. In the form's settings, scroll to Notifications and switch on Send email for new responses, then choose Complete responses only, or Complete and partial responses. It is off by default, the email goes to the address on the Typeform account, and the setting belongs to each user and each form. The email carries the answers, but check that your photo links appear in a test message before relying on it.

A Basic plan has one user, so the estimator can't have a separate login there. There are four ways round that:

1. Register the account with a shared mailbox that the estimator also reads, so the notification lands where both of you see it.
2. Use the Slack integration from the form's Connect panel. Typeform's help article lists a free Typeform account as the requirement, and photo uploads arrive in Slack as links. Its separate Slack action inside automations is listed for Business and above, so check which route your plan shows.
3. Use the Google Sheets integration so each request becomes a row, with the photo links in cells. The estimator works from the sheet.
4. Move to Plus, which includes three users, so the estimator has their own seat and their own notification switch.

One thing changed this year. Typeform's older Messages feature, which emailed respondents and teams, is described in its help centre as a legacy feature available only to accounts that signed up before 20 May 2026. Newer accounts use automations for emails to customers or to "your team", and those need the Contacts & Automations add-on, which the pricing page lists at $25 to $29 a month for 2,400 actions, depending on billing, on Plus and above. For a firm that only needs the estimator alerted, the Notifications switch, Slack or Sheets is simpler.

What each plan allows for a form like this

These are the list prices on Typeform's pricing page as of 1 November 2026, in USD. Typeform says it sometimes experiments with pricing, so check the page before you commit. For a wider look at costs and cheaper tools, see how much Typeform costs and what the alternatives offer.

The pricing page lists AI-powered form creation, conditional logic and webhooks and integrations as Basic features, which covers everything in this build. A quick sum shows where Basic runs out. Say the firm gets 35 finished requests a month and 20 people who pass the Partial Submit Point but never finish. That is 55 responses against a cap of 100. A spring promotion that doubles both lands on 110, so either plan for Plus in the busy months or add a question that sends the half-committed to a phone number instead. At 35 requests, Basic costs about $0.80 a request on annual billing ($28 divided by 35) and about $1.11 on monthly billing.

Drop-off rates sit under Business and above, so on Basic you can't see which question people quit on. You can still compare Completed and Partial counts, which is enough to tell whether the photo step is costing you requests.

Testing the form on a phone before customers do

Most quote-form failures are boring: a branch that loops, a required box that traps people, a photo that won't upload on a weak signal. Test on a real phone, not only the desktop preview, and use Preview for the path tests so they don't eat your response allowance. A live submission does count, so keep that for one end-to-end test.

Then hand the link to someone outside the business, such as a friend who has never seen the form, and ask them to request a quote for their own fence. Watch where they pause. Anything that makes them ask "what do you mean by this?" needs rewording.

Replying to a request: the first message and the estimator's brief

A form that collects the right details deserves a prompt reply. This is a first message the office can send the same day. The square brackets are filled from the form answers.

Hi [first name], thanks for the fence request and the photos. We have the details: about [length] m of [height] [style], [old fence to remove: yes/no], [number] gate(s).
Our estimator is looking at the photos today and will send a written price by [your reply time]. If anything in the photos is unclear, we'll text you one or two quick questions first.
[your name], [company]

For the estimator, a general assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude can turn a response into a checklist for the site visit, provided the customer has agreed to be contacted and you leave the name, phone number and address out of the prompt. The prompt below asks for questions, not a price, because the rate card belongs to the business. For pricing from a measured run length, see how AI turns run length into a materials list.

Here is a fence quote request (details removed). List: 1) what the estimator should check in the photos, 2) what to confirm with the customer, 3) anything that could change the price. Do not give a price. Flag any answer that conflicts with another.

A realistic sample of what comes back, illustrative only: "Run of 20 to 40 m with 'slope' ticked under obstacles: check photo 1 for stepped or raked panels. Posts set in concrete, and 'not sure' on who removes the old fence: confirm before pricing removal. Shared boundary 'not sure': ask who owns the fence before the visit. One gate at 1.2 m, but the notes say 'room to get the car in': confirm whether a wider driveway gate is wanted." Your job is to check each point against the photos yourself, since the assistant only saw the text of the answers.

Checking after a month that the form earns its place

Count four things at the end of the first month. First, Completed against Partial responses in Results. Second, how many completed requests carried at least two photos, since a form that gets one blurry photo each isn't saving visits. Third, how long the office took to send the first reply. Fourth, how many quotes priced from the form alone turned into booked jobs, compared with quotes that needed a phone call first.

Then adjust one thing at a time. If most people stop at the photo step, move it later or make all three optional. If the estimator keeps phoning about the same detail, add a question for it. If the Slack or sheet route is missing requests, go back to the Notifications setting. A quote form is never finished on day one, but a dozen well-chosen questions, tested on a phone, will beat a long form every time.

If the form works but Typeform's price or limits grate, the same questions move to another builder in an afternoon. Tally Forms against Typeform for client enquiries compares the two, and a Google Forms version for a builder's site visit shows the free route. Whichever tool you pick, requests still need somewhere to live: a pipeline sheet that tracks every enquiry is the simplest home, and following up every fence enquiry with AI covers the chasing.

Typeform quote form questions fencing firms ask

Can I use Typeform's Free plan for a fencing quote form?

You can build and test it, but not launch it as designed. The Free plan allows 10 responses a month, and the File Upload question and partial responses are paid features that you can only test without publishing. For a form that takes customer photos, plan on Basic or above.

How many photos can a customer upload?

Each File Upload question takes one file of up to 10 MB. To collect three photos, put three File Upload questions in a Question Group and make only the first one required, so a customer with a single clear photo can still finish and send the request.

Can Typeform AI change a form I have already built?

Yes. Open the form and use the Chat to create field to add questions, reorder them or edit branching rules. On a live form the AI's changes wait in draft until you click Publish edits, so customers never see a half-finished change.

Does my estimator get an email for every request?

Only if someone turns it on. In the form settings, under Notifications, switch on Send email for new responses. It is off by default and applies per person and per form, so each Typeform user who needs the alert has to enable it for themselves.

Further reads

• Fence Proposal Template: Materials, Gates and Permit Terms With AI — Turn a qualified request into a written proposal with clear scope.
• Fence Company Marketing: Local Pages, Photos and Posts With AI — Send more of the right traffic to the form you have just built.
• Lawn Care Leads: Answer Every Quote Request Fast With AI — Another trade's rules for answering quote requests quickly.
• Fence Contract Template: Draft With AI, Add Permit and Boundary Clauses — Boundary and permit wording for once the customer says yes.
• AI-Generated Welder Website Marketing: Case Study Pages for Custom Work — Turn job photos and spec notes into case study pages that bring custom fabrication enquiries, with claim checks, consent wording and a better quote form.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Typeform pricing page; Typeform help articles on Typeform AI, File Upload questions, question types, branching logic, partial responses, email notifications and the Free plan (all read 1 November 2026).