22 ms·

Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites

163 points by yupitszac 6y ago

bgdam 6y ago
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.
- 27182818284 6y ago
  I didn't quite have this harsh of an outlook, but I also immediately scrolled to see what "paid" versions there were as a "seriousness" check. That's interesting.
  - fludlight 6y ago
    I looked for the "pricing" page to see what the actual features are.
- freddyym 6y ago
  To make matters worse, the site is using third party trackers, so your data is already being abused the second you open with the site. Its also closed source. I may sound paranoid, but I won't be using the service.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    In SaaS, you're not going to find many products that don't use trackers and are open source, as much as that may be philosophically interesting to see. I actually want a SaaS company to track my behavior so they see what's wrong, fix bugs, and improve the product as a whole.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
      Why do they need to use external services to track you?
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        because external services have a free tier and they think it would cost them too much to make themselves.
      - satvikpendem 6y ago
        Well they don't have to, but I think most companies are not going to spend time and money creating their own tracking tool like Hotjar and screen recording when they could spend those resources on their own product. Comparative economic advantages and all that.
        XCSme 6y ago
        I have actually built a self-hosted alternative to Hotjar[0] and there are also some other platforms I think, so you can indeed have great analytics without relying on 3rd party services or having to build your own tool. [0] https://usertrack.net/ https://usertrack.net/
        satvikpendem 6y ago
        Wow that looks great, I might give it a go. Where is the screen recording feature, I saw it was advertised on the landing page but don't see it on the demo. Also is it open source?
        XCSme 6y ago
        Thank you! You can go to the "Visitors" list and from there you can see a summary of each visit and also view the recording.
        XCSme 6y ago
        Forgot to answer about Open Source. userTrack is not free (open-source) but sold as a product for a one-time fee. As for the soure code: currently you get the original PHP backend code but only the bundled front-end code. I am also adding soon the option to download the original front-end code (TypeScript + ReactJS + MaterialUI). I have thought about releasing userTrack as open-source, but I currently work full-time on it and I need to sustain myself, otherwise I couldn't spend the time to work on it. If I find a sustainable way to open-source it, I will.
- lasagna_coder 6y ago
  There's a donation button at the top of the page. Also, perhaps it's going to gauge volume and costs before developing a premium model. Looks like an early adopter model. Also, providing a service like this with the trade off being able to use and learn from the data for improving the product isn't uncommon (google forms, google mail...). One thought I had that could avoid the harvesting data aspect would be to encrypt the data with a public key and then allowing the host to decrypt it locally with a private key. I think that's how products like Lastpass work.
  - couchand 6y ago
    ... but where would the encryption happen? You're still just hoping they don't harvest before the encryption step.
    - lasagna_coder 6y ago
      It would be cool if there was a way to sandbox part of a website so that it could be sandboxed against specific functionality.
- florg 6y ago
  As a small business owner in Europe I have the same perspective. Maybe it's even just a gut feel of "if I pay money it's a more serious business relationship and I can depend on some rules", e.g. SLAs and data handling. The thing I immediately look for as well is GDPR information. Besides all that: it looks like a great solution! :-)
  - yupitszac 6y ago
    Ah, GDPR. Yup! On it
- divan 6y ago
  Second the opinions above, but I was also looking for some sort of explanation of why is it free (maybe some innovative idea allowed to reduce costs for long-term support or smth like that)
  - yupitszac 6y ago
    This is something that admittedly, I haven't communicated well. It's a personal project that I built because I didn't want to keep paying for a service to process forms for my static websites (though as mentioned by someone in one of the threads above I still have some forms to convert) Maybe I'll record a video explaining that and put it on the front page
- eitland 6y ago
  I'm kind of the same. Write something about what the business model is. There exist free services that I kind of trust because it doesn't matter (irc-style technical discussions or postcard-level greetings on Telegram) or because it is freemium and they seem to have a grasp on the problem of free (free matrix accounts: they sell hosted servers, mewe: limited free storage)
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Yep you can only do free if you can show your burning VC money
- 7ewis 6y ago
  I agree, companies are happier paying for things as they have someone to blame when something goes wrong. Maybe if they just offered a paid support plan, but kept the actual service itself free?
- radmin 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    >giving away your work for free undermines others' ability to make a living selling theirs. That's not his problem.
    - digitaltrees 6y ago
      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.
      - Hamuko 6y ago
        If you can't compete with a free product that comes with no support or guarantee, maybe the problem is not the person who made their product free.
      - CM30 6y ago
        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).
- pjc50 6y ago
  The thing is, this is right next to "I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich" on the HN front page ... (Realistically your best bet is to be Pinboard: not rich, but a comfortable living, built up over long years, and by picking up several waves of refugees from collapsing VC-funded competitors)
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I assume Maciej Cegłowski qualifies as rich, although certainly not wealthy.
- tomaskafka 6y ago
  On the other side, I'd love an indie-accessible service where I wouldn't pay more than a total cost of a cheap VPS and a domain for a single SaaS which forms like a 5 % of user experience. It seems that everything is either pay-with-privacy, or $100/year, with no middle ground, and that's sad for me as an indie. (Btw, I am trying to fit into this gap with a $1/mo subscription for a commercial-quality weather forecast complication for Apple Watch: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weathergraph-weather-forecast/id1501958576 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weathergraph-weather-forecast/... )
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    the difficult part is finding the right perk that divide the users from indie and professionals. for something like git number of accounts or private repository count can be enough of a signal to act as differentiation in plans, but for something like forms it's going to be hard, maybe authentication or sso, idk.
    - lukevp 6y ago
      What about 1000 submissions a month for a cheap plan vs unlimited for business/pro? Most businesses would insta buy the top tier to avoid any potential of not accepting a submission even if they never got close.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    If a business cannot afford $100/year for a critical service, the business is not viable. Or to put it another way, if a forms service is not worth a large multiple of $100/year, it's not worth having a forms service.
    - cweagans 6y ago
      A forms service is not just useful to businesses. I'd love to have a real contact form on my website, but it's all static and I don't really want to run the infrastructure myself. $100/year is _way_ too much for that case.
- yupitszac 6y ago
  This is good feedback, and quite honestly something I haven't quite figured out how to communicate to future potentially skeptical users. Basically it's just a personal project, that I host on my personal AWS account. I literally just made it because I didn't want to pay for a service anymore for my static sites that need to collect information. Maybe solidifying some of the verbiage on the website, and giving it time to not be so new are the two biggest things I can do to solve this?
ixxivvix 6y ago
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.
- Normal_gaussian 6y ago
  For me it sends a very clear message about both the intent and the delivery that I can't find a good substitute word for. I think you are being quite the prude!
  - fenwick67 6y ago
    "No BS" would work.
    - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
      That's quite the PC wordsmithing.
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  What if they billed it as "formking awesome"?
  - sbruchmann 6y ago
    It doesn't have the same ring to it as "our prices are sofa king low"
- mattbee 6y ago
  Gandi have used the exact same slogan for years. It's a good slogan! (for a startup anyway)
- blunte 6y ago
  Keep in mind that the concept of profanity varies greatly from region to region (and audience to audience). For example, where I live, "fk" and "ct" are fairly common words to say. But ironically, expletives including "god" are shocking.
redis_mlc 6y ago
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_transition_cockup/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_tra...
- specialist 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    FYI: - stick with .com - avoid .tv, or any islands/small kingdoms - .id is underfunded (lifetime domains, so no renewal fees) - research anything else
    - MildlySerious 6y ago
      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.
martinald 6y ago
I love how we are back to the world of cgi-bin formmail style services, after about 20 years.
- simlan 6y ago
  Yep exactly my thoughts.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Same but unironically
staticvar 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Or just don’t do multi page forms because those are very unpleasant.
  - karagenit 6y ago
    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.
- yupitszac 6y ago
  Super interesting. Thanks for the share!
sdan 6y ago
You can do this with Netlify
- lucasverra 6y ago
  paying after something like 100 submits..the value here is "free"
  - boarnoah 6y ago
    How long could it afford to be sustained as "free" or without invasive privacy concerns.
  - nvr219 6y ago
    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)
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    Don't be a cheapskate.
eitland 6y ago
One interesting thing: the landing seems to load pretty much instantly in both safari mobile and ff mobile :-)
satvikpendem 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
jlelse 6y ago
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
TomGullen 6y ago
You’re presumably storing a lot of personal data - perhaps inadvertently. How are you handling the minefield of data protection?
- hadtodoit 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 :)
- petargyurov 6y ago
  Yep, I would also like to know. How does this works under the hood? Where is my data stored? How can you afford to store this data for free? Lots of questions surrounding this.
- yupitszac 6y ago
  Yea, this is a tough one. Security is a super tricky component of any application, especially when you are storing data that belongs to other people. In the case of Form King, all transport is over TLS, with the RDS instances being encrypted at rest. When a form is submitted, the data is encrypted and uses the AES-256-CBC cipher prior to storage. I just didn't want to store other people's data in plain text. Form could include names, and emails, and addresses. It's also signed with a MAC to ensure the data isn't modified. This is probably some information I should include on the website as well (It's a personal project that I just work on in the evenings and weekends, so I had to prioritize stuff and the marketing website was one of the lowest :) ) Now, keeping in mind that I'm no security expert beyond what's standard for production applications, this is the area of any service that worries me the most and it'll remain a top priority to continue enhancing the security of the app.
agustif 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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/
time0ut 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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
charliebrownau 6y ago
Gday Lots of people are censored off twatter , please also use Gab or Gab+minds
ibdf 6y ago
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.
agentultra 6y ago
> Form King is free, but ti doesn't have to be ugly Spelling mistake there. Nice looking site!
- yupitszac 6y ago
  Thanks for the heads up :) I've pushed a correction
padseeker 6y ago
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?
harrisreynolds 6y ago
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
harrisreynolds 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 :)
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Wait a few days and someone else will probably make a YouTube video about using your service; then use that either direct or to inform your own video production ...
  - apotropaic 6y ago
    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?
CoreSet 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Thank you for the feedback!
st-isidore 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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?
nkron 6y ago
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-script-html-no-server https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-scrip...
- 135792468 6y ago
  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 6y ago
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.
victoriasun 6y ago
This is great and super useful! The admin panels are shockingly well designed for something that is free. Thank you!
snake117 6y ago
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.
rmnclmnt 6y ago
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
kurzawa7 6y ago
The forceful over emphasizing of "Free. no bullshit" throughout the website is off putting
- kevincox 6y ago
  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).
Zaheer 6y ago
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-google-form https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18073971/http-post-to-a-...
- yupitszac 6y ago
  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 :)
filvdg 6y ago
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.
AussieCoder 6y ago
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.

163 points by yupitszac 6y ago

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.

27182818284 6y ago
I didn't quite have this harsh of an outlook, but I also immediately scrolled to see what "paid" versions there were as a "seriousness" check. That's interesting.
- fludlight 6y ago
  I looked for the "pricing" page to see what the actual features are.
freddyym 6y ago
To make matters worse, the site is using third party trackers, so your data is already being abused the second you open with the site. Its also closed source. I may sound paranoid, but I won't be using the service.
- satvikpendem 6y ago
  In SaaS, you're not going to find many products that don't use trackers and are open source, as much as that may be philosophically interesting to see. I actually want a SaaS company to track my behavior so they see what's wrong, fix bugs, and improve the product as a whole.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    Why do they need to use external services to track you?
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      because external services have a free tier and they think it would cost them too much to make themselves.
    - satvikpendem 6y ago
      Well they don't have to, but I think most companies are not going to spend time and money creating their own tracking tool like Hotjar and screen recording when they could spend those resources on their own product. Comparative economic advantages and all that.
      - XCSme 6y ago
        I have actually built a self-hosted alternative to Hotjar[0] and there are also some other platforms I think, so you can indeed have great analytics without relying on 3rd party services or having to build your own tool. [0] https://usertrack.net/ https://usertrack.net/
        satvikpendem 6y ago
        Wow that looks great, I might give it a go. Where is the screen recording feature, I saw it was advertised on the landing page but don't see it on the demo. Also is it open source?
        XCSme 6y ago
        Thank you! You can go to the "Visitors" list and from there you can see a summary of each visit and also view the recording.
        XCSme 6y ago
        Forgot to answer about Open Source. userTrack is not free (open-source) but sold as a product for a one-time fee. As for the soure code: currently you get the original PHP backend code but only the bundled front-end code. I am also adding soon the option to download the original front-end code (TypeScript + ReactJS + MaterialUI). I have thought about releasing userTrack as open-source, but I currently work full-time on it and I need to sustain myself, otherwise I couldn't spend the time to work on it. If I find a sustainable way to open-source it, I will.
lasagna_coder 6y ago
There's a donation button at the top of the page. Also, perhaps it's going to gauge volume and costs before developing a premium model. Looks like an early adopter model. Also, providing a service like this with the trade off being able to use and learn from the data for improving the product isn't uncommon (google forms, google mail...). One thought I had that could avoid the harvesting data aspect would be to encrypt the data with a public key and then allowing the host to decrypt it locally with a private key. I think that's how products like Lastpass work.
- couchand 6y ago
  ... but where would the encryption happen? You're still just hoping they don't harvest before the encryption step.
  - lasagna_coder 6y ago
    It would be cool if there was a way to sandbox part of a website so that it could be sandboxed against specific functionality.
florg 6y ago
As a small business owner in Europe I have the same perspective. Maybe it's even just a gut feel of "if I pay money it's a more serious business relationship and I can depend on some rules", e.g. SLAs and data handling. The thing I immediately look for as well is GDPR information. Besides all that: it looks like a great solution! :-)
- yupitszac 6y ago
  Ah, GDPR. Yup! On it
divan 6y ago
Second the opinions above, but I was also looking for some sort of explanation of why is it free (maybe some innovative idea allowed to reduce costs for long-term support or smth like that)
- yupitszac 6y ago
  This is something that admittedly, I haven't communicated well. It's a personal project that I built because I didn't want to keep paying for a service to process forms for my static websites (though as mentioned by someone in one of the threads above I still have some forms to convert) Maybe I'll record a video explaining that and put it on the front page
eitland 6y ago
I'm kind of the same. Write something about what the business model is. There exist free services that I kind of trust because it doesn't matter (irc-style technical discussions or postcard-level greetings on Telegram) or because it is freemium and they seem to have a grasp on the problem of free (free matrix accounts: they sell hosted servers, mewe: limited free storage)
quickthrower2 6y ago
Yep you can only do free if you can show your burning VC money
7ewis 6y ago
I agree, companies are happier paying for things as they have someone to blame when something goes wrong. Maybe if they just offered a paid support plan, but kept the actual service itself free?
radmin 6y ago
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 6y ago
  >giving away your work for free undermines others' ability to make a living selling theirs. That's not his problem.
  - digitaltrees 6y ago
    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.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      If you can't compete with a free product that comes with no support or guarantee, maybe the problem is not the person who made their product free.
    - CM30 6y ago
      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).
pjc50 6y ago
The thing is, this is right next to "I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich" on the HN front page ... (Realistically your best bet is to be Pinboard: not rich, but a comfortable living, built up over long years, and by picking up several waves of refugees from collapsing VC-funded competitors)
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I assume Maciej Cegłowski qualifies as rich, although certainly not wealthy.
tomaskafka 6y ago
On the other side, I'd love an indie-accessible service where I wouldn't pay more than a total cost of a cheap VPS and a domain for a single SaaS which forms like a 5 % of user experience. It seems that everything is either pay-with-privacy, or $100/year, with no middle ground, and that's sad for me as an indie. (Btw, I am trying to fit into this gap with a $1/mo subscription for a commercial-quality weather forecast complication for Apple Watch: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weathergraph-weather-forecast/id1501958576 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weathergraph-weather-forecast/... )
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  the difficult part is finding the right perk that divide the users from indie and professionals. for something like git number of accounts or private repository count can be enough of a signal to act as differentiation in plans, but for something like forms it's going to be hard, maybe authentication or sso, idk.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    What about 1000 submissions a month for a cheap plan vs unlimited for business/pro? Most businesses would insta buy the top tier to avoid any potential of not accepting a submission even if they never got close.
- brudgers 6y ago
  If a business cannot afford $100/year for a critical service, the business is not viable. Or to put it another way, if a forms service is not worth a large multiple of $100/year, it's not worth having a forms service.
  - cweagans 6y ago
    A forms service is not just useful to businesses. I'd love to have a real contact form on my website, but it's all static and I don't really want to run the infrastructure myself. $100/year is _way_ too much for that case.
yupitszac 6y ago
This is good feedback, and quite honestly something I haven't quite figured out how to communicate to future potentially skeptical users. Basically it's just a personal project, that I host on my personal AWS account. I literally just made it because I didn't want to pay for a service anymore for my static sites that need to collect information. Maybe solidifying some of the verbiage on the website, and giving it time to not be so new are the two biggest things I can do to solve this?

ixxivvix 6y ago

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.

Normal_gaussian 6y ago
For me it sends a very clear message about both the intent and the delivery that I can't find a good substitute word for. I think you are being quite the prude!
- fenwick67 6y ago
  "No BS" would work.
  - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
    That's quite the PC wordsmithing.
oftenwrong 6y ago
What if they billed it as "formking awesome"?
- sbruchmann 6y ago
  It doesn't have the same ring to it as "our prices are sofa king low"
mattbee 6y ago
Gandi have used the exact same slogan for years. It's a good slogan! (for a startup anyway)
blunte 6y ago
Keep in mind that the concept of profanity varies greatly from region to region (and audience to audience). For example, where I live, "fk" and "ct" are fairly common words to say. But ironically, expletives including "god" are shocking.

redis_mlc 6y ago

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_transition_cockup/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_tra...

specialist 6y ago
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 6y ago
  FYI: - stick with .com - avoid .tv, or any islands/small kingdoms - .id is underfunded (lifetime domains, so no renewal fees) - research anything else
  - MildlySerious 6y ago
    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.

martinald 6y ago

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

simlan 6y ago
Yep exactly my thoughts.
nvr219 6y ago
Same but unironically

staticvar 6y ago

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 6y ago
Or just don’t do multi page forms because those are very unpleasant.
- karagenit 6y ago
  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.
yupitszac 6y ago
Super interesting. Thanks for the share!

sdan 6y ago

You can do this with Netlify

lucasverra 6y ago
paying after something like 100 submits..the value here is "free"
- boarnoah 6y ago
  How long could it afford to be sustained as "free" or without invasive privacy concerns.
- nvr219 6y ago
  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)
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Don't be a cheapskate.

eitland 6y ago

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

satvikpendem 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

jlelse 6y ago

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

TomGullen 6y ago

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

hadtodoit 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 :)
petargyurov 6y ago
Yep, I would also like to know. How does this works under the hood? Where is my data stored? How can you afford to store this data for free? Lots of questions surrounding this.
yupitszac 6y ago
Yea, this is a tough one. Security is a super tricky component of any application, especially when you are storing data that belongs to other people. In the case of Form King, all transport is over TLS, with the RDS instances being encrypted at rest. When a form is submitted, the data is encrypted and uses the AES-256-CBC cipher prior to storage. I just didn't want to store other people's data in plain text. Form could include names, and emails, and addresses. It's also signed with a MAC to ensure the data isn't modified. This is probably some information I should include on the website as well (It's a personal project that I just work on in the evenings and weekends, so I had to prioritize stuff and the marketing website was one of the lowest :) ) Now, keeping in mind that I'm no security expert beyond what's standard for production applications, this is the area of any service that worries me the most and it'll remain a top priority to continue enhancing the security of the app.

agustif 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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/

time0ut 6y ago

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 6y ago
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

charliebrownau 6y ago

Gday Lots of people are censored off twatter , please also use Gab or Gab+minds

ibdf 6y ago

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.

agentultra 6y ago

> Form King is free, but ti doesn't have to be ugly Spelling mistake there. Nice looking site!

yupitszac 6y ago
Thanks for the heads up :) I've pushed a correction

padseeker 6y ago

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?

harrisreynolds 6y ago

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

harrisreynolds 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 :)
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Wait a few days and someone else will probably make a YouTube video about using your service; then use that either direct or to inform your own video production ...
- apotropaic 6y ago
  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?

CoreSet 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Thank you for the feedback!

st-isidore 6y ago

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 6y ago
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?

nkron 6y ago

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-script-html-no-server https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-scrip...

135792468 6y ago
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 6y ago

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.

victoriasun 6y ago

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

snake117 6y ago

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.

rmnclmnt 6y ago

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

kurzawa7 6y ago

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

kevincox 6y ago
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).

Zaheer 6y ago

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-google-form https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18073971/http-post-to-a-...

yupitszac 6y ago
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 :)

filvdg 6y ago

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.

AussieCoder 6y ago

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.