FlyFly

I wanted to add a contact and help form to a website I was building but didn't wanna use TypeForm or setup a database to store the responses.

I looked around and found Formspree, a service that lets you POST a form to their API. It was great, but had two problems;

• They only allowed a multipart form submission, which limited what you could submit and what format you could submit it
• The UI left a lot to desire

So I decided to build something myself. I had bought the domain flyfly.dev to test Flynn on a DigitalOcean box, but that failed and I just it lying around so it felt like a good use.

I started with a GraphQL API written in Node and backed by a PostgreSQL database supercharged with Prisma. I built the frontend with React and Next.js. When I had deployed everything, my hosting bill was $15 for backend (API and database hosted on Render), and $20 for frontend (hosted on Vercel). I realized that it was a tad too expensive for a side project, so I decided to rewrite the backend as part of my Next.js app. I looked around and found FaunaDB, which compliments the serverless nature of Vercel very well. However, my schema was a bit tricky so I dropped it in favor of MongoDB, hosted on Atlas.

Now, everything is part of my Next.js app and my total cost is $20 plus $9 for MongoDB. As I grow, I'll upgrade my Atlas plan, but Vercel will stay fixed.