The person behind the plugin

I built this because every form plugin wanted to upsell me.

Hi. I'm Gaurav Tiwari. I've been building WordPress sites for 17+ years, ran 850+ client projects through my agency, and lost count of how many times a "free" form plugin asked me to pay for the one feature my client actually needed. Core Forms is the plugin I wanted to install. So I built it, used it on real client sites for two years, then made it public.

Why this plugin exists

Most form plugins are priced like printer ink. The base is cheap or free, then the actually-useful parts: file uploads, conditional logic, payments, webhooks, Mailchimp, a CRM integration, are sold separately at $49 to $199 a year, each. By the time you've assembled a working stack you're paying more than a hosting plan and renewing on five different dates.

I got tired of explaining that math to clients. So I started building the bits I needed straight into a single plugin, used it on production sites across the agency, and let it mature for two years before charging anyone. Core Forms ships with every premium feature included by default. File uploads. Webhooks. Payments via Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, Polar, FluentCart. reCAPTCHA, Turnstile, math captcha, honeypot. Mailchimp, MailerPress, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Brevo, HubSpot, Drip, MailerLite. A headless REST API for embedding inside Astro or Next.js. Polls. A Gutenberg block. The lot.

One license. Unlimited sites. No add-on tax.

That's the entire thesis. I'm not pretending Core Forms is the first form plugin or the only one you should consider. I'm saying it's the one I wish had existed five years ago, and the only one I install on my own sites today.

Who's actually writing this

I'm a developer, performance engineer, and the founder of Gatilab, an independent WordPress agency. I've been writing PHP and shipping WordPress sites since 2008, which is enough years that I've watched the entire Gutenberg arc twice and lived through three generations of caching-plugin religion.

Some numbers, because vague claims help nobody:

17+ years building on WordPress, full-time independent since 2018.
850+ clients served through Gatilab. Project sizes from $35 fixes to $46K enterprise builds.
~10,000 active installs across my free plugins on WordPress.org.
5,000+ published articles on gauravtiwari.org and partner sites, with 410M+ impressions on file.
$20M+ in client revenue influenced through the sites, funnels, and forms I've built.
500M+ people reached via government digital campaigns (Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, 2016 to 2018).

The agency work has put me in production with teams at IBM, Adobe, HubSpot, Canva, Monday.com, FreshBooks, Acer, Asus, IATA, and Express.co.uk, among others. I'm not name-dropping for the sake of it. Each of those engagements had a forms problem to solve, and every one of those problems pushed against the limits of whatever plugin stack I was using at the time: file uploads that needed to scale, webhooks that needed to retry, payment flows that needed to not lose orders, integrations that needed to stop being a CSV-and-Zapier kludge. Core Forms is the plugin that fell out of those pushes. If a feature is in the box, it's because a real client needed it first.

For a sample of what current Gatilab work actually looks like, here's a slice of the live project list (the full version sits on gauravtiwari.org/work):

IAS Compass by Rau's IAS

UPSC exam prep

Resource and study-material hub for one of India's largest civil-services coaching brands.

Anantam IAS

UPSC CSE, Delhi

Full website + admissions funnel for a Delhi-based civil-services coaching institute.

OnlyCUET

CUET coaching

Exam-prep platform for the Common University Entrance Test; mock tests, study plans, enrollment forms.

Rushu

Luxury eCommerce

Couture saree brand from Delhi. Product catalog, made-to-order configurator, payments.

Trippy Mania

Travel

Travel-booking and insights publication with affiliate monetization built in.

OveReview

Affiliate publishing

Deals + buying guides site running on the same forms / submissions / payments stack.

Earlier in the timeline: PieSync (SaaS, later acquired by HubSpot), OnlyLoudest (tech magazine, later acquired by YouStable), CollegeDunia (college directory), plus the 2016 to 2018 stretch of digital campaigns for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The flagship of that government work was the PM-KISAN rollout, which reaches roughly 46% of India's working population, and it's the project where I learned what "forms at actual scale" really meant.

Background, briefly. M.Sc. in Mathematics. Taught for several years before going full-time independent. INSPIRE scholar. The math degree is the one that matters most for plugin work, honestly. It shows up in how I think about query performance, edge cases, and the kind of testing that catches "looks right but isn't" bugs.

Other things I build and maintain

Core Forms isn't a one-off. I ship and maintain four other WordPress plugins right now, mostly free on the .org repository. Active installs are the only metric I trust for "is this thing actually being used", so they're listed below.

Dynamic Month & Year into Posts

8,000+ active installs

Shortcodes for live dates, years, ages, seasons, and countdowns inside post content, titles, and meta.

GT Link Manager

Free on .org

Fast, free branded link manager. Custom DB tables, early redirects, CSV import/export, block editor integration.

Dynamic Functionalities

Free on .org

Sixteen modules for performance, security, SEO, redirects, and content cleanup. Replaces five or six smaller plugins.

Formatting Extender

Free on .org

Extends the Block Editor formatting toolbar with badges, highlights, and inline controls Gutenberg should have shipped years ago.

Beyond plugins I run gauravtiwari.org (the publishing engine where I document everything I learn about WordPress performance, SEO, and tooling) and Gatilab (the agency, where the real-world scar tissue gets earned). I've also built or rebuilt several EdTech and exam-prep platforms over the last five years, which is where multi-step forms, payments, and webhooks really started mattering at scale.

If you want the full plugin list with version histories, the WordPress.org profile is the public source of truth.

What you can expect

This is a one-person product (plus contractors when the work needs them). Three things I try to be predictable about:

Real replies to support. Email gaurav@gauravtiwari.org and you get a human. Usually me. Usually within a business day. If a reply is going to take longer because I'm travelling or shipping a release, the autoresponder says so honestly.
Versioned changelog, public roadmap. Every release lands on /changelog/ with the actual changes, not "performance improvements and bug fixes". The /roadmap/ page lists what I'm working on, what's queued, and what I'm thinking about.
No surprise upsells inside the plugin. No "upgrade to Pro" banners in the admin. No locked features pretending to be available. Buying the plugin gets you the plugin, every feature, every integration, on every site you'll ever build. That's the whole deal.
A real refund window. 14 days, no questions asked, full refund. Details on /refund/. If it doesn't fit your stack, I'd rather you have your money back than feel stuck.

Current version is v4.3.0, shipped on May 17, 2026. The release cadence is roughly monthly for minor versions, faster when something breaks.

That's the pitch. The rest is your call.

Try the live demo first if you want to kick the tires without installing anything. Or grab a license and use it on your next form. Code CFLAUNCH takes 20% off either plan.

Get Lifetime — $249 Yearly — $59/yr Email me directly →