For shops taking orders on a Google Form
The free stack works, and at a few orders a week it's hard to beat. This page is about the five places it comes apart for an embroidery shop, and about when you should keep it anyway.
Google Forms costs nothing. Square's basic invoicing costs nothing beyond the card rate. There's no subscription to justify before your first order comes in.
You wrote every field. Garment, size, spelling, thread color, where it goes. If you want a question about the school's mascot, you add it. A form you built asks exactly what you need.
The invoice gets paid by card, the money arrives in your bank, and the receipt goes out on its own. That part of the stack is solid, and Square's reporting is better than a notebook.
The customer fills in the form. You read it, work out a price, type it into a Square invoice, and send that. The customer pays. Nothing connects the three, so the order you stitch from is a form response, an invoice, and a message thread that you match up by name. When two customers are both named Jen, you match them up by guessing.
A form collects 'MAMA, cream thread, left chest.' It can't show the customer what that looks like in your actual font on the actual sweatshirt. The approval happens later, in a chat, off a photo you made by hand, and the yes lives in that chat. Broidry shows the customer a mockup of their piece and records the approval on the order.
Google Forms only accepts a file upload from a respondent who is signed in to a Google account, and the form's total upload space defaults to 1 GB. A customer with a photo of their handwriting and no Gmail can't send it through the form. They text it to you instead, and now the spec is split again.
A form can't price a sleeve add-on, can't say a color is out of stock, and can't stop someone ordering a 3XL in a style you don't carry in 3XL. Every response has to be read by you for the things it got wrong before it becomes an order. Broidry's order form is built from your listing, so the choices on it are the ones you actually offer, at the prices you set.
The design file, the thread numbers, the stitch count, and what the customer paid last time live in your files, your machine, and Square, in that order. When the same customer comes back in a year, you rebuild the order from memory. Broidry keeps the design, the colors, and the price on the customer's record so a reorder is a copy, not a search.
Where the details come from and how many of them arrive.
One yes, one payment, both on the order.
The order should turn into a schedule and a history.
If that's you, build the form with every field required and keep the response sheet as your order list. The order tracking guide has the column list.
Google Forms is free. Square's basic invoicing is free and charges Square's card rate on each payment; Square Invoices Plus is $20 a month in the US and adds saved templates, milestone payment schedules, multi-package estimates, and custom fields. Broidry is free to start, with up to 15 orders a month and a 2% fee on payments that go through Broidry. The Maker plan ($19 a month) makes orders unlimited and drops the fee to 1.5%, and the Shop ($39) and Atelier ($79) plans add more on top. Standard card processing applies to card payments the same way anywhere. Full detail on the pricing page.
Yes, and plenty of shops do. Build the form with a question for every detail you need before you stitch: garment, size, color, exact wording, font, placement, thread color, and how they want it back. Make each one required. The limits are that the form can't show a preview, can't price the order, and can only take a photo upload from someone signed in to a Google account, so approval and payment still happen somewhere else.
Google Forms has no payment in it. The usual pairing is a Square or PayPal invoice you create by hand after reading the response, or a payment link you paste into the confirmation message. The order is not confirmed until that invoice is paid, so keep a column in the response sheet for it and check it before anything is hooped.
Google Forms is free. Square's basic invoicing is free and charges Square's card rate on each payment; Square Invoices Plus is $20 a month and adds saved templates, milestone payment schedules, and custom fields. Broidry is free to start with 15 orders a month and a 2% fee on payments through Broidry; the Maker plan is $19 a month for unlimited orders at 1.5%. Standard card processing applies on both.
When you're spending more time matching form responses to invoices to chat threads than you'd spend stitching. The signs are a piece stitched from an old response after the customer changed their mind in a message, a payment you can't find because it's under a different name, and a reorder that starts with 'what thread did I use last time?'
Google Forms and Square Invoices details as published by Google and Square, read September 2026.
The customer picks from what you sell, sees their piece, approves it, and pays, and the order shows up on your stitching list with nothing missing. Free to start.
The Free plan costs nothing until your first sale, and signing up does not ask for a credit card. The Free plan covers 15 orders a month, and any month a customer pays you by card through Broidry has no limit at all.