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

formking.io

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

#53

Post by nvr219 »

lucasverra wrote: post #23
sdan wrote: post #15

You can do this with Netlify

paying after something like 100 submits..the value here is "free"

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)

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

#55

Post by couchand »

lasagna_coder wrote: post #5
bgdam wrote: post #2

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 wa…

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 encry…

... but where would the encryption happen? You're still just hoping they don't harvest before the encryption step.

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

#56

Post by padseeker »

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?

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

#57

Post by CoreSet »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18

Reminds me of StaticKit ( 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.

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.

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

#59

Post by harrisreynolds »

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!

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

#60

Post by CoreSet »

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

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