
Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites - yupitszac
https://www.formking.io
======
nkron
This looks really nice but I was burned by another free form service
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16466147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16466147))
that just disappeared without any notice.

I ended up switching to using a Google script which I've been happy with so
far: [https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-
scrip...](https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-script-html-
no-server)

~~~
135792468
Ditto. [https://www.palabra.io/forms/](https://www.palabra.io/forms/) was
around here a few weeks ago and I just started using it when it went
missing/broken.

I’ll try your google solution, thanks

------
aioprisan
Would you be willing to open source this? That way it can stay free forever
(at least basic functionality) and you'll likely increase the adoption by
other folks.

------
agustif
I've been recently looking for form solutions

Free [https://www.staticforms.xyz/](https://www.staticforms.xyz/)
[https://formsubmit.co/](https://formsubmit.co/)

Paid [https://formbucket.com/](https://formbucket.com/)
[https://formspree.io/](https://formspree.io/)

You can also check out Netlify Forms

~~~
notwhereyouare
I'm currently using formsubmit and I'm pretty happy so far. As far as I know,
I haven't had any issues getting responses

~~~
agustif
I had to switch from it last minute, because one of my forms wouldn't
activate, actually, I did get the Form Activated to appear, and some emails
passed, but then It was still deactivated, and found myself in an endless
loop. Idk, but I had to go with a paid option so my boss would be reassured it
would work on monday.

Anyway a few more I found when I had to switch last time, I went with
usebasin.

[https://liveformhq.com/](https://liveformhq.com/)
[https://www.formbackend.com/](https://www.formbackend.com/)
[https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/](https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/)
[https://formbucket.com/](https://formbucket.com/)
[https://www.formking.io/](https://www.formking.io/)
[https://formspree.io/](https://formspree.io/)
[https://www.staticforms.xyz/](https://www.staticforms.xyz/)
[https://formcarry.com/](https://formcarry.com/)
[https://formkeep.com/](https://formkeep.com/)

------
Zaheer
PSA: You can do the same thing with Google Forms + Sheets.

Here's how to post to a Google Form:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18073971/http-post-
to-a-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18073971/http-post-to-a-google-
form)

~~~
yupitszac
Yea absolutely! You can also just build a form backend to handle your data
collection. Or even just use another forms service (there are a ton).

This was just a personal project that I made available in case anyone else had
a need for it :)

------
ibdf
Nothing free lasts forever, but that's how a lot of people gage interest
anyway. Having said that... this is a good solution for small site's contact
form which you wouldn't care much about privacy or if it went away in a couple
of years.

------
st-isidore
Nice job offering something for free. I'm not as skeptical as some here; looks
like you just wanted to build something useful for people and it's not going
to cost too much to provide it. At the very least, it's a great project to
have under your belt, with real customers, etc. Could help landing jobs, for
sure!

I had to figure out how to handle my contact form on my static blog recently,
and I decided to simply write a form handler with Go and deploy it on Google's
Cloud Functions. It's free for now (and probably always will be considering
the fact that I'll probably never receive more than ~10 form submissions per
month anyways). The function takes awhile to spin up cold, but it doesn't
matter too much. I like it because the code is simple and I "own" the service.

Curious to hear what other static site admins have decided to use for their
forms.

~~~
yupitszac
Thanks for the thoughts! It's still a young service, and honestly there are a
ton more users than I expected so early

GO is super interesting, and I like that you wanted total control over your
process. I've never used Google Cloud Functions but that's similar to Azure
Functions or AWS Lambda, yea?

------
kurzawa7
The forceful over emphasizing of "Free. no bullshit" throughout the website is
off putting

~~~
kevincox
Yeah, I'm wondering why it is going to stay in service? Maybe they should
emphasize that they are donation supported (if that is the plan).

------
bgdam
I might be in the market for a forms service, and have been researching them a
bit over the past few weeks. As a potential customer, here is the single
biggest thing that made me instantly say no: free. Even worse it's unlimited
free, not even freemium.

That means either the service will sell my information, or the information of
my customers (if not now, eventually), or that it's going to die shortly. And
I don't want to put in the effort of migrating my sites to your service in
either of those cases.

So my advice to you is to start charging.

~~~
radmin
Yes, please start charging. Aside from the effect it has on perceived
trustworthiness, longevity, etc., giving away your work for free undermines
others' ability to make a living selling theirs.

~~~
Hamuko
> _giving away your work for free undermines others ' ability to make a living
> selling theirs._

That's not his problem.

~~~
digitaltrees
But it is. It’s called a race to the bottom. While it’s a normal price setting
function of free markets that doesn’t mean its rational.

~~~
CM30
So people shouldn't have a blog, since people read that content instead of
paid books, magazines or newspaper articles? Or post videos on YouTube,
because TV and films aren't free? Or work on open source software, since that
might save people the need to buy software from companies that are selling?

Truth of the matter is, an awful lot of things that were previously
commercially viable simply aren't any more because people are happy giving
them away for free or releasing them with ad support. Few people will buy a
web browser or CMS or programming language compiler/interpeter/envrionment,
because free competition has made commercial ones obsolete.

Either way, it's just life. Things that were once expensive services only
available to wealthy became commoditised and affordable for pennies, and new
types of business became viable in their place.

So if you're running a company selling a form service and free competition is
outcompeting you, then you'll have to adapt or die like anyone else. Or find
some value proposition people are willing to pay for in that area (support,
customisations, lots of new features, a glossy design, etc).

------
ixxivvix
I kind of hate the profanity being part of the branding, or anywhere else that
I’m going to use professionally. It’s pretty useless since it’s not actually
describing the service (what exactly does “no bullshit” mean for forms?), and
just detracts it and the team or developer who made it.

~~~
oftenwrong
What if they billed it as "formking awesome"?

~~~
sbruchmann
It doesn't have the same ring to it as "our prices are sofa king low"

------
redis_mlc
Looks like a good MVP, but the .io domain is a non-starter because of the past
registrar/mgmt. problems (ie. entire registrar and DNS being pwned.)

If anybody knows if .io mgmt. is professionally managed now, let me know.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_tra...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_transition_cockup/)

~~~
specialist
Thank you for this. I wouldn't have known to even look. Now I wonder if there
are TLD and registrar auditing and rating surveys.

~~~
redis_mlc
FYI:

\- stick with .com

\- avoid .tv, or any islands/small kingdoms

\- .id is underfunded (lifetime domains, so no renewal fees)

\- research anything else

~~~
MildlySerious
Equally, something seems to be up with .af currently. Both Gandi and Namecheap
can't register those currently (only places I checked) and haven't been able
to for at least a week. No idea how long this has been going on.

------
TomGullen
You’re presumably storing a lot of personal data - perhaps inadvertently. How
are you handling the minefield of data protection?

~~~
hadtodoit
I don't think anyone is using his service, including himself. This page on his
personal website uses a google form.

[https://www.yupitszac.com/life-of-a-
contractor/](https://www.yupitszac.com/life-of-a-contractor/)

~~~
yupitszac
Of the hundreds of forms out there across the static properties that are mine,
and that I work on, it'll take time to convert them all.

As for user counts, one of the benefits of it being a personal project is that
I don't have to share or defend that. It's a service that's there, if you want
it feel free to use it. If not, that's completely okay too

I'll add that form to my list for conversion though, so at least thanks for
that :)

------
staticvar
Cool stuff. If you are interested in doing multipage forms and need something
that already has a form editor UI, check out the open source <tangy-form> and
<tangy-form-editor> web components. Disclaimer, I'm a contributor to those
projects.

~~~
swiley
Or just don’t do multi page forms because those are _very_ unpleasant.

~~~
karagenit
They definitely have their place. For example, if the answer to one question
affects which other questions are relevant it's nice not having to put down
"not applicable" in a bunch of answer boxes.

------
harrisreynolds
A bit more feedback after looking at your site.

First... put a live form on the home page.

Second... include a screenshot of the a live form, not just the backend of
form submissions.

Third, for extra credit... create a simple video of using the tool end to end.

Best of luck!

~~~
yupitszac
Thanks for the feedback! It's still a super young service that I built and
work on in my spare time. I was already working on some blog posts, but the
video idea is perfect!

A live form, of course. People want to see how it works and play with it. I'll
get these put together and up soon! Thanks again for taking a look :)

~~~
apotropaic
Another idea along those lines... I like to play with the form builders before
creating an account. Shows what field types are available and how it works.
Maybe a demo site?

------
AussieCoder
Shameless plug - StaticForms
([https://staticforms.co](https://staticforms.co)).

It's not free because I want it to be sustainable, but also because it does
more than just capture form data and send you an email. You might not need
more than that, but if you do then it's probably even more important that it's
a sustainable business.

------
filvdg
We are running [https://formlets.com](https://formlets.com), wishing them the
best, i can tell one thing from experience, we have a free offering too, 100%
free is not sustainable,you will need payed accounts to get a sustainable
business, within weeks to months (depending on the popularity) the phishing
people will find your service and you will need a full time person to track
them and remove the forms or your reputation will be toast. Its a brutal
market to be in.

------
harrisreynolds
Looks good Zac! I love that you came straight out of the gate with "No BS".
Classic!

I've built a similar service but it also includes a website builder if anyone
here is interested. Check it out at
[https://www.webase.com](https://www.webase.com)

------
padseeker
I think one of the challenging parts of selling a form builder is trying to
figure out where you draw the line of free to paid. Do you limit the number of
submissions? Per month or forever? The number of forms? The number of inputs
per form? Access to the API? Integration?

------
jlelse
I built a self-hosted tool (for myself) that sends form submissions via email:
[https://git.jlel.se/jlelse/MailyGo](https://git.jlel.se/jlelse/MailyGo)

------
agentultra
> Form King is free, but ti doesn't have to be ugly

Spelling mistake there.

Nice looking site!

~~~
yupitszac
Thanks for the heads up :) I've pushed a correction

------
snake117
Thanks for sharing! Do you mind me asking what admin template you used for the
app? I'm searching for a decent admin template right now with a similar color
scheme.

------
victoriasun
This is great and super useful! The admin panels are shockingly well designed
for something that is free. Thank you!

------
eitland
One interesting thing: the landing seems to load pretty much instantly in both
safari mobile and ff mobile :-)

------
rmnclmnt
I'm sorry but no privacy policy and not an open-source/free-software? I find
it hard to believe it is "free" as in free beer...

Shameless plug: if you want a self-hosted AGPL-3 alternative with optional PGP
support, checkout "mailer":
[https://github.com/rclement/mailer](https://github.com/rclement/mailer)

------
martinald
I love how we are back to the world of cgi-bin formmail style services, after
about 20 years.

~~~
simlan
Yep exactly my thoughts.

------
sdan
You can do this with Netlify

~~~
lucasverra
paying after something like 100 submits..the value here is "free"

~~~
nvr219
100 free submits/month. I use this for my tiny side projects. Anything that
needs more I would want to pay for anyway (like everyone else said here)

------
time0ut
Is there a privacy policy? I couldn't find one, but maybe I didn't look in the
right place.

How do you intend to monetize? It is important to make sure your business plan
aligns with my potential use cases.

Small typo: it is misspelled as ti on the landing page.

It looks cool and I'll give it a try, but I need to know more than is
obviously apparent from your site before I can use it for real.

~~~
yupitszac
Thanks for the feedback :)

Privacy policy, yea. I gotta get one of those up. Incredibly important things
like that and terms of use should be sorted right away. This is one of the
things I forget about in my personal projects (like FormKing) that I really
should stop forgetting :)

As for monetization, that's not my goal. One thing I don't think I
communicated well is that this isn't a business. It's a personal project that
I intend to open source shortly. The cost for the service (hosting, domains,
etc) is super low so for right now I'm not looking to monetize.

Form King was literally just something I built for use with my websites that I
had a lot of fun working on. So I made it public

------
CoreSet
As someone who recently added a "fremium" / "free for solo developers" tiers
to their form service this is fascinating.

We give you unlimited forms but gate on submissions, offering more features /
submissions in higher tiers etc.

Reading the blog it doesn't look like there is anything malicious about
selling user data or some "you are the product"-type bait and switch, but with
one dev and no financial incentive I don't see how he keeps this going (No
knock to him, asking unlimited free work is a lot).

Forms seem like sort of a small thing, but you really want them to _work_.
Having a whiff on even a contact form can miss a lead and looks bad. And if
the service breaks, all of a sudden you have to change a bunch of source code
pointing to a defunct service, and hope they have an export function.

(shameless plug for the curious, since some people are suggesting services:
[https://formcake.com](https://formcake.com)

~~~
aroch
Shouldn't your tag line be "The Form Backend Built For Developers", with
"built" not "build". And a little more unsolicited feedback: the
rendering/display of code example under /How It Works/ looks kind of sloppy --
I think it might actually look better when JS is disabled. Similarly, not a
big big fan of the fullwidth Codepen embed.

~~~
CoreSet
Thank you for the feedback!

------
satvikpendem
Reminds me of StaticKit ([https://statickit.com](https://statickit.com)) by
Derrick Reimer who built Drip and co-hosts the Art of Product podcast. There
might be some interesting lessons if you listen to their podcast, many of
Reimer's insights on static site forms are made public through it.

~~~
CoreSet
The funny part about this too if you listen to the podcast is that Derrik
Reimer is ending statickit because he is having trouble monetizing it /
finding product-market fit with static sites.

~~~
satvikpendem
Interesting, I haven't listened to the latest episodes. Netlify already has
forms, as do other vendors, so I don't see too much of a use for StaticKit,
unless you host your site on your own servers rather than a CDN.

