You can do this with Netlify
paying after something like 100 submits..the value here is "free"
Don't be a cheapskate.
Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#72A 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!
Thanks for the feedback! It's still a super young service that I built and work on in my spare time. I was already working on some blog posts, but the video idea is perfect!
A live form, of course. People want to see how it works and play with it. I'll get these put together and up soon! Thanks again for taking a look :)
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#73I 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…
This is good feedback, and quite honestly something I haven't quite figured out how to communicate to future potentially skeptical users. Basically it's just a personal project, that I host on my personal AWS account.
I literally just made it because I didn't want to pay for a service anymore for my static sites that need to collect information.
Maybe solidifying some of the verbiage on the website, and giving it time to not be so new are the two biggest things I can do to solve this?
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#74Would you be willing to open source this? That way it can stay free forever (at least basic functionality) and you'll likely increase the adoption by other folks.
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#75This is great and super useful! The admin panels are shockingly well designed for something that is free. Thank you!
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#76Earlier 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?
It's a personal project that I built and maintain in my spare time (nights and weekends). My only real goal with tracking is to understand how people use the service and where they might be getting stuck.
I'm by no means a UI or UX expert :)
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#77> Form King is free, but ti doesn't have to be ugly Spelling mistake there. Nice looking site!
Thanks for the heads up :) I've pushed a correction
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#78I 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…
As a small business owner in Europe I have the same perspective. Maybe it's even just a gut feel of "if I pay money it's a more serious business relationship and I can depend on some rules", e.g. SLAs and data handling. The thing I immediately look for as well is GDPR information. Besides all that: it looks like a great solution! :-)
Ah, GDPR. Yup! On it
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other side, I'd love an indie-accessible service where I wouldn't pay more than a total cost of a cheap VPS and a domain for a single SaaS which forms like a 5 % of user experience. It seems that everything is either pay-with-privacy, or $100/year, with no middle ground, and that's sad for me as an indie. (Btw, I am trying to fit into this gap with a $1/mo subscription for a commercial-quality weather forecast…
If a business cannot afford $100/year for a critical service, the business is not viable. Or to put it another way, if a forms service is not worth a large multiple of $100/year, it's not worth having a forms service.
A forms service is not just useful to businesses. I'd love to have a real contact form on my website, but it's all static and I don't really want to run the infrastructure myself. $100/year is _way_ too much for that case.
Re: Show HN: I built a free forms service for static websites
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Wow that looks great, I might give it a go. Where is the screen recording feature, I saw it was advertised on the landing page but don't see it on the demo. Also is it open source?