Who is Julien Nahum?
Founder of NoteForms and OpnForm, based in Paris. Known for building the first form builder on the Notion API, then releasing the same engine as open source under AGPLv3 as OpnForm.
This page recognises Julien Nahum for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I am about to put my forms, and my respondents' data, on NoteForms or OpnForm, and I want to know who is behind them and how they have been run.”
This page covers where both products came from, the numbers Nahum has published about them himself, and how the open source side is licensed and funded. It does not compare feature lists, quote current pricing or tell you which plan to pick.
Notion opened its public API on 13 May 2021. Julien Nahum had left a software development engineer job at Amazon Web Services in London earlier that year and moved back to Paris, where he grew up, to work on his own products full time. He spent four days coding a form builder against the new API and finished the MVP two days after announcing that he was building it. He has said it was the first Notion extension available.
It went out free with no plan for charging. About a month in, someone offered $6,000 to buy the project and he came close to taking it. A pro tier arrived shortly after at $15 a month, launched to the existing free users with a 40 percent lifetime discount coupon, and the first payment landed the same night. In his Indie Hackers interview he noted that this first customer was still subscribed.
On 1 July 2022, a bit more than a year after launch, the product reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and he wrote the whole year up on his own blog with the figures attached. NotionForms was later renamed NoteForms. Its site now says it is trusted by more than 130,000 users and companies and lists it as an official Notion integration.
The idea came from Airtable, the timing came from the API
Nahum came out of University College London with an MEng in computer science and spent his AWS years building side projects on the weekends. At an earlier startup job he had used Airtable's built-in form view, which drops submissions straight into a table, and there was no equivalent anywhere in Notion. When the API arrived he built one: a form editor where each property of a Notion database becomes a field, so answers land as new rows in the database the team already works in. The first version did account creation, connecting a Notion workspace and basic field types, and he shipped it without waiting to polish it.
The footer link did the selling
Every form on the free plan carried a line underneath it crediting the builder. Forms get embedded on other people's pages and shared with people who have never heard of the tool, so each one placed a link somewhere new, which fed word of mouth and Google search at the same time. In his Starter Story interview he put more than half of all acquisition down to that loop. He worked the manual channels alongside it, posting in Notion Facebook groups, on Reddit, on Twitter and in Slack communities, and has been blunt that being brand new and free bought him tolerance for how much he posted. Product Hunt took two attempts; the second one finished as number one product of the day.
The same form builder, with Notion taken out
OpnForm is that product without the Notion dependency, storing submissions itself. Nahum's stated reason for opening the code was that he uses open source software constantly and wanted to contribute back to it. The repository sits under AGPLv3, built on Laravel and Nuxt with PostgreSQL, with Docker deployment guides for anyone who wants it on their own server, and it has passed 3,600 stars and 500 forks with outside contributors sending patches. A hosted version exists for people who do not want to run the infrastructure. On Product Hunt he described the gap plainly: there was no good open source form builder out there.
Then Notion shipped its own forms
Notion eventually added a native form view to databases, closing the exact gap NoteForms was built for, and Nahum had been talking about that platform risk publicly well before it happened. His response was a comparison guide on the NoteForms site, published on 28 December 2025 under his own byline, which gives Notion's built-in forms credit for quick internal triage and then makes the case for the paid product on editable submissions, lookup and update flows, multi-page forms, custom domains and branding controls. On the OpnForm side he has been building the parts that larger buyers ask about: SSO and SAML, role-based permissions, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and hosting in France or on the customer's own infrastructure. Self-hosted instances run the core for free, with an Enterprise Licence unlocking the advanced features and lifting the two-user cap, which is the mechanism paying for the open source work.
Why Julien Nahum is on this list
The week Notion opened its API, the thing most Notion users immediately wanted was a public form that wrote into a database, and Nahum shipped it before anyone else and kept a free tier on it. He then published his entire first year on his own blog with the revenue figures, the $6,000 and $350,000 offers he turned down, and the channels that actually worked, which handed everyone else building on the Notion API a real reference to work from. Releasing the same form engine as OpnForm under AGPLv3 means anyone in the Notion community can read the code, self-host it or fork it.
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