Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

I've often wanted a simple online form solution for random purposes, yet I have never quite gotten around to learning Google Forms. My kids use it for school stuff. They're reasonably capable with it and have gotten good mileage from it. I guess at some level it's hard for me to get into something that often requires flexibility, yet can't be modified beyond rigidly prescribed boundaries.

I would totally rather learn something like this that I can hack on. And when other people ask me how to do something for a Real reason, I would not hesitate to recommend the hosted version if it can do what they want. (No, I don't want to be on the hook for maintaining a self-hosted version of something that will be depended on for wide public consumption. I'm done with pager duty.)

The creators' hearts seem to be in the right place, so I'm less subliminally worried that they'll enshittify it in some way that bothers me. And if they do, the license gives me a way to proceed without starting with something new from scratch.

Same experience here. Admittedly it's been a few years since I last used it, but there was so much boilerplate coupled with a layer of "magic" that was too thick for my liking.

Provider initialization (dependency injection) failed on me on a few occasions and it always wasted hours of productivity. It would break in some obscure way that wouldn't log any errors to the console, so there was nothing to go on besides attaching a debugger and stepping through layers of framework code. It was quite infuriating because it always happened when I was in the middle of something else.

If your specific use case wasn't covered by their docs (which were very barebones and "hello-world" oriented at the time), it was painful to figure out and use.

I'm literally in the middle of spending my evening, outside of work, gutting NestJS from a project I've inherited at work. I would literally consider changing jobs if I couldn't remove it.

There is so much to unpack to get as why I have such an issue with it. But time and again I have been frustrated with it in terms of: it's design philosophy, implementation, scope of what it covers, bloat, recommended implementation approaches, etc.

I don't understand how a single framework can think that it should cover: message/request handling, logging, config management, dependency inversion, persistence, and IO. These things have almost no cross over (i.e. if they are well designed they should be easily composable with any other component) but time and again framework developers attempt to bundle them into a "one size fits all solution".

To best sum it up. I think any package I use should be secondary to my application. But this package makes it so that my application is secondary to the framework.

> But a good open source forms app would probably change everything

Can you go into that a bit more, I'm interested what you would see changing. Why do you think it hasn't been done already?

Limesurvey is “good enough” for most applications and is open source- any reason why that wouldn’t work for your use case?