I know how to work around this, but it's ridiculous, isn't it? And every "simple" form API service ends up being an oil tanker's worth of extras for having to justify being a paper-thin middleware that charges $10-$100 per month.
Can we do better somehow?
Is there a major hosting offerer that doesn’t have it included with their basic plan? Here’s squarespace’ very clear directions for their plans: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543887-...
If you are looking for a free option that can be embedded on any page check out https://web3forms.com
Contact forms are nobodies favorite thing. Marketing departments know that they are pretty low conversion with lots of spam, and customers see them as a way for companies to ignore them. Put this way: do you ever want to be shunted off to a contact form?
This is a solved problem more or less.
If you think that you can do better than google forms, and Microsoft whatever and the other 1,000 competitors in a space that is decades old, give it a shot.
Version 0: make sure you limit it to a specific set of recipients, because if you leave it open ended, you will get reported and shut down for abuse.
Version 1: Spot a pattern of fields that are clearly from a bot, and drop the message silently if you can, so as not to reveal your filters.
Version 2..14: Repeat step 1 a few dozen times, till a new wave comes a few years later
Version 15: realize messages wern't being sent for a few weeks, because something went wrong/out of disk space/some random glitch, and add monitoring
Version 16: Consider a database with an interface if you can't reliably email the target because the messages are marked as spam by the target's spam filter, and figure out how to white list your form
Version 17: Consider if the value brought by the form makes it worth it to consider a third party .....
FWIW, I've done this for a client. I'm somewhere around version 15 .... :-/
There's a lot of value in having one computing device on the internet that you control. You have a monthly cost, but every time something like this comes up you can juist "do the thing" on that machine and have zero extra costs.
Sometimes, the people running the business don't even know they have a website, or that the leads are going somewhere, or how to get access to them
When you decide to take inbound contacts seriously, it's usually worth it to have some good tools to get in touch quickly and keep track of the interactions (like having the form be integrated with your CRM, and automatic callbacks - or click to call, triggered by inbound leads)
- tally.so forms, can embed anywhere
- cloud function (gcp)
- sendgrid (adds to contact list)
Unless you're getting hundreds of contacts a day this setup is basically free.
Demo:
https://500k.agency/mba-interest
Source
https://github.com/500k-agency/functions/blob/master/functio...
Someone has to set this up, maintain it, and pay for it.
Some providers such as Cloudflare seem to make this painless but I haven’t tried it myself.
Forms are the de-facto use cases for any web property. It looks and functions simple but someone has to maintain it and keep up-keeping it. It is no longer simple.
4. https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/scrape-shield/em...
1) You can customize it and add your company logo/image. Can also limitedly change colors to match your branding.
2) It can be set to notify you of new submissions (ie each time someone fills it and submits it, you get an email)
3) It’s free and easy to set up.
4) You get a link which you place behind a ‘Contact Us’ text on your website. When users click it, it opens up the form.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/plugins/ma...
There is IMHO no viable market for a simple and cheap endpoint to save arbitrary data somewhere.
If you're competing for people with little technical skills and need a simple and "dumb" service, they are captive to you and you can charge more, albeit in exchange for a more polished experience. You also need extra for the support costs and marketing etc.
Targeting savy technical users is a losing proposition as they can build it for cheap enough (or reuse part of some other service provider's infra for that purpose), so you need to either be dirt cheap and that's no sustainable business, or be enterprise grade.
I agree, it is frustrating to have super fancy things available, but not the basics.
- To me, a key would be not just getting it done (at any cost), but not being obnoxious about it in some way (a concept about which people probably have different ideas/ideals).
- For this kind of product, IMO, there are a bunch of boxes to tick, and nobody is really executing superbly in the area.
- A weird market for sure; does micro reflect macro here somehow?
Sure, there are solutions, but, as you seem to indicate, a lot of them can have an off taste.
In my view, the answer used to be Tutanota Secure Connect, but that was discontinued [0]. (Not the cheapest, but a good product.)
- Thus, as a sub-niche of contact forms, there is currently a small but certain UNFILLED market opportunity for "hosted E2EE web forms". The requirements, though, are several: a good product with a slightly mature set of features, a company that seems like it has its priorities as straight/clear as can be expected, a product/company that won't fizzle out overnight, and expertise in security/etc.
# Possible solution
What's the (micro) startup on HN that was offering something like "user data hosting API, built for the long haul--cheap, sustainable, out of your mind/worry, built in Washington" or some such? I forget the name, but it seemed solid, though I can't find it in search easily. I think, for DIY, that might be a decent option, but it is still "build your own page, submit to our API" in some regard, and not "get a hosted customizable web form page", which would be my personal preference.
EDIT: Found it, UserBase [1, 2, 3] was the possible suggestion. Does this come close to helping somehow?
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/16ik6ni/closest_r...