@Jeffro - To answer your question...

In talks with others through the grapevine, this direction doesn’t surprise me at all. In fact, a lot of people are surprised that GForms didn’t do this sooner. Can you confirm or deny that at some point in the future, all of the functionality found within the Gravity Forms plugin will exist on a site and no longer be in the plugin? If so, then all this GPL crap has no more meaning for you and now, GForms has been opened up to a lot more sites as it could become platform agnostic. Sounds to me like the groundwork for that is being laid.

No. There are no plans for the bulk of Gravity Forms to be turned into a SaaS service and for us to store all of your data, display your forms via JS embed code, etc. and the plugin itself to be simply a gateway to that data. That is what Wufoo and Formstack does. That isn't what we do.

Going SaaS takes a way a lot of the advantages that we have being a WordPress plugin that the SaaS solutions don't have which is deep WordPress integration with the ability to do a wide variety of things such as create content, users, update content, update users, etc. So that isn't something we are looking at doing. Being a WordPress plugin and the fact that our product is self-hosted and provides tight WordPress integration is a key differentiator for us that the SaaS form solutions simply don't have.

Where we do plan on leveraging SaaS is to tackle certain things such as our #1 support issue: email notification reliability and deliverability. Sending email on self-hosted web servers via PHP simply isn't reliable and is a major pain in the ass. So many web hosts, so many different configurations, so many domains with DNS not setup properly to reliably send email and so many web hosts providing users with IP addresses that are blacklisted so emails sent from those IP addresses never arrive. NONE of these are issues Gravity Forms causes or has any control over. But it's something that takes up a large amount of our support teams time.

This is an example of where a SaaS service to offload handling sending the actual email notifications would allow us to eliminate a major support issue that we currently have no control over. We would do so by partnering with an extremely reliable email service provider such as SendGrid, MailGun, Mandrill, etc. I listed a few big names, we know our most likely partner but nothing is set in stone just yet. But it'll be backed by one of the biggest and most reliable email providers available. Email notifications for forms are important. Making sure deliverability of these notifications is important. We want to make sure they are as reliable as possible and SaaS will help us do that.

Another example is SMS notifications. Currently in order to to SMS notifications you'd need to install the Twilio Add-On, create a Twilio account, pay for Twilio, configure the Twilio Add-On with your API information, etc. We want to streamline things and make them more user friendly and simply make SMS a type of Notification you can configure. Again, it would then be handled via SaaS and like email we'd partner with a major provider of SMS services such as Twilio to handle actually sending the SMS. No installing an Add-On, no needing to know what Twilio is. Simply create a notification, select SMS instead of email and it just works.

These are some examples. There are others.

We have no plans to move Gravity Forms aware from it's roots as a self-hosted WordPress form solution. We also don't plan on making it platform agnostic at this time. The WordPress marketplace is so large that as big as we are right now we have only scratched the surface. The work involved in making Gravity Forms platform agnostic wouldn't pay off due to the marketing that would be necessary to acquire non-WordPress users. I don't think the payoff would be worth it.

But we definitely plan on implementing SaaS solutions within Gravity Forms to make certain functionality much more reliable and take some things that are currently completely out of our control due to the way WordPress and self-hosted solutions work and give us more control in order to make them more reliable and help curb the amount of support issues they cause.

Gravity Forms will never be a 100% SaaS WordPress plugin. But it will become more of a hybrid where certain functionality is handled via SaaS. Your data will still be your data. We're more concerned about leveraging SaaS in order to make key functionality more reliable and less prone to causing support issues that are out of our control.

Hopefully that helps explain some of the ways we plan on using SaaS in the future and the groundwork is indeed already being laid.

As for Pressnomics, you are correct. Don't miss it next year. It was hands down the best WordPress event i've ever been to because it focused entirely on what interests me... the business of WordPress.