The Client Intake Form for Agencies and Freelancers That Starts Fully Built

Choose your service type and send the link. Brief ships 12 pre-built intake questionnaires covering web design, branding, and social media management, ready to send on day one.

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A client intake form for agencies and freelancers hits the same problem every time: you either build it yourself in JotForm or Google Forms, or you copy last client's intake and edit it for the new project type. Either way, the form misses questions specific to this engagement, clients leave fields blank because they are not sure what you need, and the first week of every project becomes a follow-up email thread chasing missing brand guidelines, hosting credentials, or a clear answer on the target audience.

JotForm and Typeform are capable platforms. They give you conditional logic, file uploads, and branded forms. They do not give you the questions. For a freelance web designer onboarding a new e-commerce client, the questions that matter are: existing platform, admin credentials, competitor references, content ownership status, and launch date. A generic contact form does not surface them. A blank JotForm template does not either.

What Happens When Your Freelancer Client Onboarding Form Asks the Wrong Questions

JotForm and Google Forms both assume you know which questions to include for your specific service type. For a brand identity project, the right intake covers logo usage context, existing brand elements to retain, typography preferences, industry competitors whose branding you should avoid, and the file formats the client's team actually uses. None of those questions appear in any default form template because they require knowing what a brand identity project needs before it starts. The consequence is a kickoff call spent gathering information that should have been in the intake, and a week of follow-up emails before the designer can open a new file.

Introducing Brief

Select your service type from the intake library. Brief opens a pre-built questionnaire covering every question your project type needs answered before kickoff, with help text that guides clients through the answers. It replaces the build-from-scratch intake workflow and the follow-up email thread that delays project starts for freelancers and agencies running multiple service types.

What You Get — $29/month

Service-specific intake library — 12 pre-built intake forms for web design, brand identity, social media management, SEO audit, copywriting, logo design, email marketing setup, and more. Each form covers the questions that matter for that specific project type.

New client questionnaire for web design projects — Covers brand voice, competitor references, existing asset inventory, target audience, hosting credentials, content ownership, and launch deadline in the order clients can answer them accurately without a follow-up call.

Required field enforcement with client prompts — Mark fields as required and add plain-language help text explaining what you need. Clients see the context they need to give complete answers instead of guessing what "brand guidelines" means.

Intake completion notifications — Notifies you by email or Slack when a client submits their intake, with a summary of key fields so you can review before the kickoff call.

Client-facing intake portal — Each intake has a branded URL you send to the client. They complete it in a browser with progress saving, so they can stop mid-way and return without losing their answers.

Asset upload fields — Clients upload existing logos, brand guidelines, photos, and source files directly in the intake. Files are organized by project in your Brief dashboard.

Project intake form template editor — Reorder or remove questions in any pre-built intake to match your workflow. Brief saves your changes as the default for that service type going forward.

Structured response export — Export completed intakes as a PDF or JSON file for import into HubSpot, Notion, or your project management tool.

Why $29/month

JotForm's Bronze plan starts at $39/month for a blank form builder with no service-specific templates. Building a complete web design intake from scratch in JotForm takes one to two hours for someone who has run that project type before. Brief at $29/month gives you 12 pre-built service intakes, asset uploads, completion notifications, and the intake editor, all ready on day one. The Agency plan at $59/month adds team access, custom logo branding, CRM export, and unlimited file storage for practices with multiple designers or account managers. If Brief saves you one hour of intake building and one day of follow-up email per project, it pays for itself in the first engagement.

Who This Is For

You run a freelance practice or small agency and send a client intake form at the start of every new engagement. You have rebuilt the same intake from scratch in Google Forms or JotForm more than once, or copied a previous client's form and edited it for the new project type. Your current intake regularly returns incomplete responses that require follow-up before you can start work.

The Complete Intake on First Submission Guarantee

If you send a Brief intake to a client and it returns fewer than 80% of required fields completed, contact support. A Brief team member reviews your intake configuration and adds the help text and required field settings to get your next submission complete. Every service template in Brief ships with required fields and help text validated by freelancers who have run that project type.

In 30 Days, You'll Have:

• Complete client intakes returned for your next two or three projects, with all the information needed to start without follow-up emails
• A customized intake saved for each service type you offer, ready to send again without rebuilding
• A Brief dashboard organizing submitted intakes, uploaded assets, and client responses by project
• A clear record of what every client provided at intake, accessible to any team member who joins a project mid-stream
• At least one kickoff call where you already have the hosting credentials and brand files before the meeting starts

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Brief work as a freelancer client onboarding form for non-design services?
Brief includes pre-built intakes for copywriting, SEO audits, email marketing setup, and social media management alongside the design-focused templates. If your service type is not in the current library, the intake editor lets you build from the closest template and save it as your own. New service templates are added each quarter based on user requests.

How is Brief different from JotForm for a creative agency?
JotForm gives you a flexible form builder where you configure every question yourself. Brief gives you pre-built intake questionnaires for specific service types with the right questions already in place. For an agency that onboards clients across multiple service types and does not want to maintain a custom JotForm for each one, Brief removes the rebuild-from-scratch cycle and the missed-question problem that follows.

How long does it take to send a Brief intake to a new client?
Most freelancers send their first intake within five minutes of signing up. Select your service type, copy the client link, and send. The intake is fully configured with questions, help text, and required fields. Customizing the template for your workflow takes 10-15 minutes the first time and saves as your default for every subsequent client of that type.

What if I offer a service type not in Brief's library?
The intake editor lets you modify any existing template or build a custom intake within Brief. Your custom intake saves with your account and is available for future clients of that type. Brief's template library covers the 12 most common freelance and agency service types, with new templates added each quarter.

What it is: A client intake form platform for agencies and freelancers with pre-built questionnaires for 12 service types, covering every question your project needs answered before kickoff.
What you get: 12 service-specific intake templates, required field enforcement, client prompts, completion notifications, branded intake portal, asset uploads, template editor, response export.
Price: $29/month (unlimited intakes, all templates, asset uploads) or $59/month (team access, custom branding, CRM export, unlimited storage).
Catch: Brief's pre-built templates cover the most common freelance and agency service types. Highly specialized project types may require using the intake editor to add service-specific questions before sending.
Guarantee: Brief team reviews and improves your intake configuration if your first submission returns fewer than 80% of required fields completed.
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