Let's concede the thing everyone leads with: the video isn't better here. The big tools' video is fine, and nobody ever switched software for sharper pixels. Formation is a call that opens inside the room you already run your work from — so the notes, the action items and the record are already where they belong the moment you hang up.
You can take a call anywhere. What costs you is the hour after — retyping what was decided, chasing the action items into your task list, remembering who agreed to what. Formation writes the call into a meeting record as it happens: the shared notes are the meeting's note, the action items become tasks, and it's all filed against the project before you've closed the tab.
Nobody switches video products for better video. They switch because the hour afterward disappears.
A guest taps one link, types a first name, and they're in. No account, no download, nothing to install.
The shared notes are the meeting's one note. Whatever's typed in the room is in your Logbook when you hang up.
An action item in the room becomes a task on the project, starred for whoever owns it.
The call belongs to a meeting, the meeting to a project. Minutes, time and what waited on it all hang off it.
The person you invite never makes an account and never installs a thing. They land on a door, type their name, and join — and the door tells them, in plain words, exactly what will and won't happen before they're in the room.
Formation is peer-to-peer — every person's video goes straight to every other person, with no server in the middle. That's what keeps it private and cheap, and it's also why it tops out around four. It's a room for a conversation, not a webinar. If you run twelve-person workshops, keep what you have — this won't replace it, and I won't pretend it will.
Nothing is kept server-side — no recording on my machine, no transcript, no talk-time stats. And no call is recorded at all without every person in it being told, on the door, before they enter.
Nothing, and they never count toward your seats. The $12 is workspace-wide, once — no matter how many people you get on calls, or how often.
No. Meetings are standard and free — a church hall, a phone call, a kitchen table all get the same record. Formation is one venue a meeting can have.
Every meeting, note and action item stays exactly where it is. You just stop having a room to open — nothing is deleted.
It's fine. It is not the reason to use this, and I won't dress it up. If pristine 4K on a forty-person webinar is the need, this is the wrong tool.
In the browser, peer-to-peer, with a relay only when a strict network forces it. Nothing to install, for you or your guests.
Switch it on for two weeks. Send one link to whoever you're meeting, and see whether the hour afterward disappears.