Free Client Intake Form Template for Freelancers

The problem

A plain “contact me” form gets you a message, but not enough to know if the inquiry is even worth a reply — what kind of project, what budget range, how soon. That usually means a round of back-and-forth email just to find out basic scope before you can give a real answer.

Expected outcome

By the end of this guide you will have an intake form that asks the qualifying questions up front — project type, budget range, timeline — so you can tell at a glance whether an inquiry is worth your time before you write a single reply.

Requirements and costs

• A website (static or otherwise) you can add HTML to.
• A free Formspree account to receive submissions by email.
• Cost: free, within Formspree’s free-tier submission limit.

Step-by-step implementation

1. Create a free Formspree account and a new form, and copy the form ID it gives you.
2. Download the starter from the link below.
3. Open intake-form.html and replace YOUR-FORM-ID with your real Formspree form ID.
4. Adjust the project type and budget options in the two <select> fields to match your own services and typical pricing.
5. Add both files to your site and publish.

A real example

An inquiry comes in: project type “Website,” budget “A$500-A$2,000,” timeline “within 2 weeks.” You now know in five seconds whether that fits what you charge and your current availability — no reply needed just to ask those same three questions yourself.

Verification and troubleshooting

What we actually checked: the downloaded HTML for a POST-method form, a Formspree action URL, required name/email/timeline/details fields, a project-type selector, a budget-range selector, and a honeypot field — all 6 present. This confirms the form is built correctly; it does not confirm a live Formspree account actually receives it, since that requires your own account and form ID.

Troubleshooting:

• Submissions arrive but without the budget/project-type values. Make sure you didn’t rename the name="..." attributes on the select elements — Formspree uses those exact names as the email’s field labels.
• You want more or different qualifying questions. Add more fields the same way — a label, a matching input/select, and a name attribute; no changes needed to the form’s action or honeypot.
• You’re getting spam submissions anyway. The honeypot catches simple bots that fill every field; for more persistent spam, Formspree’s own paid tiers add reCAPTCHA integration.

Free vs. paid

This is free and complete for qualifying inquiries before you reply. Paid client-management tools add automatic lead scoring, CRM integration and follow-up sequences — useful once you have enough volume that manual triage itself becomes the bottleneck.

Free resources

The download contains the form, its styling, and a short setup README.

Download the client intake form (ZIP, 2 KB)

Is there a paid version?

Not yet. This is the complete method. TNT Review has sold nothing to date and has no checkout, so any price we discuss in future should be read as a hypothesis, not an offer.