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5 Comments

Serverless forms for static sites

Hello indie hacker, I need your advice!

I want to develop a simple service to handle forms submitted. It will be open-source and easy to deploy. The only thing that stops me is “does someone else need it?” or there is already a great solution that I overlooked.

I have a static site (link in profile) which serves my freelance portfolio and several forms on it to get the quote requests. I’m struggling with the spam on my forms, that’s why simple solutions (aka forward form submission to email) didn’t work for me.

All of the proposed solutions are either paid or abandoned by founders or require a lot of work to deploy.

I’ve tried several paid solutions but none of them worked as expected. For instance, they count spam requests from black-listed IP addresses in a monthly quota. Also they don't support ReCaptcha V3 and force me to show captcha to the end-users which significantly drops the conversion rate. Maybe I overlook something, and there is a good solution to my problem, let me know.

My plan is to develop an open-source serverless backend for forms submission. You can deploy it with one-click deployment to heroku or google cloud run and pay cents to host it. Another option is to collocate it on your own hardware and run it in a docker container.

Service will NOT include forms constructor, it’ll handle the forms submission and do notifications.

The complete list of features:

  • Google Recaptcha v3 integration
  • IP blacklist
  • Regular expressions to filter spam texts (for example reject text that contain only digits)
  • Submit form via AJAX or via standard submit
  • Notifications via webhook (it’s possible to do Zapier integration, Slack, Rocket chat, Telegram)
  • Notifications via email

I ask your advice on this to prevent useless work. If you’re happy to use this service please DM me with your email I’ll include you to the beta-testers list. If not, comment why and you will save me from days of useless work.

  1. 2

    Check the competition. Have you seen https://formspree.io/ ?

    1. 1

      Yep, I saw it. The difference between it and my solution is the price. My solution is 10x cheaper than Formspree "Gold" plan. All other features are the same.

  2. 1

    I would recommend a very good serverless forms
    FabForm.io an intelligent forms backend with many features. One many features is that it reduces form spam. There is a free plan available.

  3. 1

    You can just use a contact link from https://contact.do - shameless plug :)

  4. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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