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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

#61

Post by satvikpendem »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #47
satvikpendem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In SaaS, you're not going to find many products that don't use trackers and are open source, as much as that may be philosophically interesting to see. I actually want a SaaS company to track my behavior so they see what's wrong, fix bugs, and improve the product as a whole.

Why do they need to use external services to track you?

Well they don't have to, but I think most companies are not going to spend time and money creating their own tracking tool like Hotjar and screen recording when they could spend those resources on their own product. Comparative economic advantages and all that.

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

#62

Post by satvikpendem »

CoreSet wrote: post #57
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.

Interesting, I haven't listened to the latest episodes. Netlify already has forms, as do other vendors, so I don't see too much of a use for StaticKit, unless you host your site on your own servers rather than a CDN.

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

#63

Post by karagenit »

swiley wrote: post #27
staticvar wrote: post #11

Cool stuff. If you are interested in doing multipage forms and need something that already has a form editor UI, check out the open source and web components. Disclaimer, I'm a contributor to those projects.

Or just don’t do multi page forms because those are very unpleasant.

They definitely have their place. For example, if the answer to one question affects which other questions are relevant it's nice not having to put down "not applicable" in a bunch of answer boxes.

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

#64

Post by CM30 »

digitaltrees wrote: post #39
Hamuko wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving away your work for free undermines others' ability to make a living selling theirs. That's not his problem.

But it is. It’s called a race to the bottom. While it’s a normal price setting function of free markets that doesn’t mean its rational.

So people shouldn't have a blog, since people read that content instead of paid books, magazines or newspaper articles? Or post videos on YouTube, because TV and films aren't free? Or work on open source software, since that might save people the need to buy software from companies that are selling?

Truth of the matter is, an awful lot of things that were previously commercially viable simply aren't any more because people are happy giving them away for free or releasing them with ad support. Few people will buy a web browser or CMS or programming language compiler/interpeter/envrionment, because free competition has made commercial ones obsolete.

Either way, it's just life. Things that were once expensive services only available to wealthy became commoditised and affordable for pennies, and new types of business became viable in their place.

So if you're running a company selling a form service and free competition is outcompeting you, then you'll have to adapt or die like anyone else. Or find some value proposition people are willing to pay for in that area (support, customisations, lots of new features, a glossy design, etc).

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

#65

Post by blunte »

ixxivvix wrote: post #7

I kind of hate the profanity being part of the branding, or anywhere else that I’m going to use professionally. It’s pretty useless since it’s not actually describing the service (what exactly does “no bullshit” mean for forms?), and just detracts it and the team or developer who made it.

Keep in mind that the concept of profanity varies greatly from region to region (and audience to audience). For example, where I live, "fk" and "ct" are fairly common words to say. But ironically, expletives including "god" are shocking.

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

#66

Post by st-isidore »

Nice job offering something for free. I'm not as skeptical as some here; looks like you just wanted to build something useful for people and it's not going to cost too much to provide it. At the very least, it's a great project to have under your belt, with real customers, etc. Could help landing jobs, for sure!

I had to figure out how to handle my contact form on my static blog recently, and I decided to simply write a form handler with Go and deploy it on Google's Cloud Functions. It's free for now (and probably always will be considering the fact that I'll probably never receive more than ~10 form submissions per month anyways). The function takes awhile to spin up cold, but it doesn't matter too much. I like it because the code is simple and I "own" the service.

Curious to hear what other static site admins have decided to use for their forms.

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

#67

Post by aroch »

CoreSet wrote: post #60

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 d…

Shouldn't your tag line be "The Form Backend Built For Developers", with "built" not "build". And a little more unsolicited feedback: the rendering/display of code example under /How It Works/ looks kind of sloppy -- I think it might actually look better when JS is disabled. Similarly, not a big big fan of the fullwidth Codepen embed.

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

#68

Post by nkron »

This looks really nice but I was burned by another free form service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16466147) that just disappeared without any notice.

I ended up switching to using a Google script which I've been happy with so far: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-to-send-email-via-google-scrip...

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

#69

Post by XCSme »

satvikpendem wrote: post #61
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to use external services to track you?

Well they don't have to, but I think most companies are not going to spend time and money creating their own tracking tool like Hotjar and screen recording when they could spend those resources on their own product. Comparative economic advantages and all that.

I have actually built a self-hosted alternative to Hotjar[0] and there are also some other platforms I think, so you can indeed have great analytics without relying on 3rd party services or having to build your own tool.

[0] https://usertrack.net/

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

#70

Post by yupitszac »

st-isidore wrote: post #66

Nice job offering something for free. I'm not as skeptical as some here; looks like you just wanted to build something useful for people and it's not going to cost too much to provide it. At the very least, it's a great project to have under your belt, with real customers, etc. Could help landing jobs, for sure! I had to figure out how to handle my contact form on my static blog recently, and I decided to simply writ…

Thanks for the thoughts! It's still a young service, and honestly there are a ton more users than I expected so early

GO is super interesting, and I like that you wanted total control over your process. I've never used Google Cloud Functions but that's similar to Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, yea?

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