We kept solving the same problem. So we built the standard.
Formspec is built by Michael Deeb, TealWolf Consulting & Focus Consulting.
Years of building forms for government. Then we stopped and asked why.
We work with federal agencies and regulated industries — the kinds of organizations where a 200-field grant application or a clinical intake form isn't a side project, it's the primary interface between the institution and the people it serves.
Every engagement started the same way: someone describes a complex form, a development team spends months building it, and then a requirements change means half of it gets rebuilt. The next client has different fields but the same structural problems — conditional logic, calculated budgets, cross-field validation, offline support, accessibility. We were solving the same category of problem from scratch every time.
Web development has HTML. APIs have OpenAPI. Data interchange has JSON Schema. Forms — despite being everywhere in government, healthcare, and compliance — have nothing. No shared standard. Every organization builds from scratch or locks into a vendor platform.
We decided to build the standard we wished existed.
Consultants who got tired of duct tape.
Michael Deeb leads the project through TealWolf Consulting and Focus Consulting. The work comes from years of building and maintaining forms for grant programs, compliance reporting, and clinical workflows — and from the frustration of watching good teams spend months on problems that should have been solved once, well, for everyone.
The project went from initial research to a working specification, dual reference implementations, a visual studio, and an MCP server in about three weeks. Not by cutting corners — by spending the first week entirely on getting the specification right, then letting the formality do the heavy lifting. When the boundaries are clean, the code writes fast.
A standard that only one company uses isn't a standard.
We built Formspec in the open because the problem it solves — a missing standard for complex forms — can't be solved by a single organization. Standards gain value through adoption. A form specification locked inside a proprietary platform is just a proprietary format with good marketing.
Everything is AGPL-3.0 licensed. The specifications, the schemas, the implementations, the tooling. Form definitions are plain JSON files you own. No vendor dependency, no required runtime, no lock-in. We want people to build on this, fork it, write alternative implementations, and push it in directions we haven't thought of.