We kept solving the same problem. So we built the standard.

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, with Focus Consulting as a strategic partner. 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 open-core 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.