BlockSurvey

There is a question almost nobody asks the survey vendor, and it is the only question that matters. Not "how many question types do you support." Not "can I add my logo." The question is: after my respondent hits submit, who else can read what they wrote?

For SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, Qualtrics and effectively every other name in the category, the honest answer is: we can. Not maliciously, usually. But the data sits on their servers in a form their engineers can access, their analytics can aggregate and, in some jurisdictions, their lawyers can be compelled to hand over. The privacy policy governs behaviour. It does not govern capability.

BlockSurvey exists because two engineers in India decided that gap was worth building a company inside. Wilson Bright and Raja Ilayaperumal had each spent roughly a decade in fintech - which is to say, both had spent years watching exactly where form submissions actually go. In 2019 they quit. They had already failed three times at other products. In July of that year they entered a hackathon run by the Stacks blockchain community, an event named, with a straight face, "Can't Be Evil."

They won it. The prize was $20,000 from Blockstack and a working MVP: a survey tool that encrypted every response in the respondent's own browser, before it ever crossed the wire. They put it on Product Hunt. Three hundred people signed up the first day.

"When you fill a contact form, all your information is just gone; it's almost like sending it through a blackhole and you can't reclaim it."

Wilson Bright, Co-founder & CEO

The pitch fits in five words

Bright's own framing has been consistent for six years: Signal, but for forms and surveys. Encrypted messaging got a credible alternative when Signal arrived. Encrypted data collection did not have one. He called the space underserved, which was polite. It was empty.

The mechanics are simple to state and awkward to build. A respondent opens a BlockSurvey link. Their answers are encrypted client-side using keys derived from the survey owner's account. The ciphertext goes to storage. The survey owner decrypts it locally when they log in. BlockSurvey the company holds no keys at any point in that chain. Originally the identity and storage layer ran on Stacks and its Gaia decentralised storage - a Bitcoin-anchored setup that let the account itself be user-owned rather than platform-issued.

Which produces the most unusual sentence in the company's documentation. Lose your key and your data is gone. Permanently. Support cannot help you.

"All your data is encrypted. We don't have the keys. BlockSurvey doesn't hold those keys either. There is no way for us to unlock that data. This is similar to crypto keys where if you lose your wallet, you lose your funds."

Wilson Bright, to YourStory

Most SaaS companies would bury that. BlockSurvey leads with it, because the irreversibility is the proof. A vendor who can restore your data can also read it. There is no third option.

Who actually buys this

Here is where the story stops being a crypto story. The founders built for a Web3 audience. The people who arrived were therapists.

Clinical psychologists running intake forms. University research offices with institutional review board obligations. Nurses at a care institute. NGOs and mental health advocates. Then, in mid-2020, protest organisers in the United States who needed RSVP forms that could not be handed over to anyone - not because of a policy, but because there was nothing to hand.

"People were using our tool for getting RSVPs for organising #BlackLivesMatter protest rallies. I think people were looking for a safe, censorship-free tool in this space."

Wilson Bright

That was the tell. The market was not ideological privacy enthusiasts. It was professionals with legal exposure - people who sign a consent form promising confidentiality and then need tooling that makes the promise true. The customer list now reads like two different companies got merged: PepsiCo and Brave Browser on one side, Carnegie Mellon, the University of South Carolina, Bucknell, Hebrew SeniorLife, Hopelab, the City of Columbia and the US Military Health System on the other.

The compliance moat nobody writes about

A twenty-person company should not be able to sell to a US military health system. Procurement at that kind of institution does not care whether your form animations are smooth. It asks whether you will sign a HIPAA business associate agreement, whether you have a SOC 2 report, whether the FERPA addendum is on file, and whether the survey meets WCAG accessibility standards for the students who have to fill it in.

BlockSurvey has answers to all of those - ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, WCAG - which is unglamorous work and one of the few remaining moats in SaaS that money alone does not buy quickly. Combined with encryption, it produces a strange competitive position: cheaper than the enterprise research suites, more certified than the design-led form builders.

Then the AI arrived, and the pitch got sharper

The obvious risk for an encryption-first company in 2023 was that AI would make privacy look like a tax. Everyone else's tool could suddenly write your survey, summarise your responses and cluster your themes - because everyone else could read the data.

BlockSurvey's answer came in stages. September 2023: an AI form generator that builds a full questionnaire from a plain-language description. It reached #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. July 2024: automated thematic and sentiment analysis. May 2025: AI Agents for Surveys, which reached #4 Product of the Day - an agent that designs the questionnaire, then holds an actual conversation with each respondent, asking unscripted follow-ups when an answer is thin, then codes the transcripts into structured findings.

By 2026 the homepage no longer leads with blockchain at all. It leads with "Meet Your New AI Survey Assistant." The encryption did not go anywhere; it moved underneath, from headline to substrate. That is usually what happens to infrastructure that works.

The business model, and the discipline behind it

BlockSurvey sells subscriptions. That is the whole model, and the constraint is deliberate: no advertising, no benchmarking panel, no reselling aggregated response data. Those revenue lines are all foreclosed by the architecture, which is precisely why incumbents cannot copy the positioning without dismantling parts of their own P&L.

A free tier gives one user ten responses a month. Standard runs $39 a month billed annually for 6,000 responses a year, Premium $79 for 24,000, Team $119 for three to five seats and 60,000. Enterprise is custom and adds white-labelling, SSO via SAML, migration and training. Independent researchers and non-profits get discounts, which is unusual - most vendors reserve flexible pricing for the buyers who need it least.

The capital story is the part founders should look at twice. Total raised in seven years: $500,000, in a February 2022 pre-seed from nine investors including Stacks Accelerator, GBV Capital and DeSpread. Before that, the $20,000 grant. The product was free for its first six months after the 2020 launch, reached 10,000 users, and the company was cash-positive within half a year. Third-party estimates put 2024 revenue near $304,000 with roughly 500 paying customers and an average contract around $600.

That is not a rocket ship. It is a company that has never had to assume the next round would arrive - and, judging by the shipping cadence, has spent the freedom well.

"Today, we have alternative instant messaging apps like Signal or Telegram, but we didn't have anything in this space as an alternative for forms and surveys. We found this space to be underserved."

Wilson Bright

What you can actually do with it

The feature list has some genuinely odd corners, and the odd corners are the interesting part. You can gate a survey behind Discord membership, a GitHub account, a Reddit profile or a verified email domain - useful if you are surveying a community and need to know the responses came from members without knowing which member. You can route respondents over onion routing. You can run offline collection in the field, then sync. You can auto-translate into a hundred-plus languages while the responses stay encrypted.

For the research crowd there is crosstab analysis, SPSS export, Gabor-Granger pricing studies, NPS and CSAT scoring, matrix tables, constant sum, rank order, quota management and screen-outs. Over a hundred integrations push results into Slack, Discord, Google Sheets, Airtable, HubSpot, Zendesk and Power BI, and single sign-on runs through a partnership with Ory.

Where it sits, and what it is betting on

Tracxn ranks BlockSurvey 81st among 883 companies in its competitive set, behind SurveyMonkey, Typeform, QuestionPro and the panel businesses. On G2 it carries 4.7 out of 5 across 136-plus reviews - fewer reviews than SurveyMonkey's 23,000, a higher average than its 4.4.

Small, in other words, in a category with giants. But the bet is not that BlockSurvey out-features Qualtrics. It is that a growing slice of data collection is legally or ethically incompatible with the default arrangement - health data, student data, employee whistleblowing, human-subjects research, work in countries where the answers put people at risk. For that slice, "we promise not to look" is not an acceptable answer, and no amount of product polish makes it one.

The founders were unusually early to that. They were also, by Bright's own account, unusually stubborn: three failed products, a decade of fintech abandoned, and a fourth attempt built on a weekend hackathon prompt. His advice to founders is characteristically flat. Hit the ground first without worrying about anything. And, more quietly: having a co-founder really helps in many ways to stay strong every day.

Seven years on, the company still cannot read a single one of the ten million responses it has handled. That was always the product.