Ask HN: Why is hosting a contact form so difficult? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is hosting a contact form so difficult?

24 pointsscrollaway22 comments

I think of all the absurd businesses that shouldn't be lucrative, from selling barcodes to NFTs, you'd think "selling forms" wouldn't be, and yet there's no clean way to make a contact form for a website running on something simple like Github Pages.

I know how to work around this, but it's ridiculous, isn't it? And every "simple" form API service ends up being an oil tanker's worth of extras for having to justify being a paper-thin middleware that charges $10-$100 per month.

Can we do better somehow?

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Namecheap has it built in to their cheapest shared hosting plan that costs $24 yearly (for the entire hosting plan). You could exclusively use their contact form if you wanted and it would handily beat your quoted price point.

Is there a major hosting offerer that doesn’t have it included with their basic plan? Here’s squarespace’ very clear directions for their plans: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543887-...

If you are looking for a free option that can be embedded on any page check out https://web3forms.com

Contact forms are nobodies favorite thing. Marketing departments know that they are pretty low conversion with lots of spam, and customers see them as a way for companies to ignore them. Put this way: do you ever want to be shunted off to a contact form?

This is a solved problem more or less.

If you think that you can do better than google forms, and Microsoft whatever and the other 1,000 competitors in a space that is decades old, give it a shot.

If you can write code, you can spin up a VPS or a lamba function (or whatever) for pennies per month, to be a HTTP POST target, and forward messages to whomever you hard-code into it.

Version 0: make sure you limit it to a specific set of recipients, because if you leave it open ended, you will get reported and shut down for abuse.

Version 1: Spot a pattern of fields that are clearly from a bot, and drop the message silently if you can, so as not to reveal your filters.

Version 2..14: Repeat step 1 a few dozen times, till a new wave comes a few years later

Version 15: realize messages wern't being sent for a few weeks, because something went wrong/out of disk space/some random glitch, and add monitoring

Version 16: Consider a database with an interface if you can't reliably email the target because the messages are marked as spam by the target's spam filter, and figure out how to white list your form

Version 17: Consider if the value brought by the form makes it worth it to consider a third party .....

FWIW, I've done this for a client. I'm somewhere around version 15 .... :-/

`mailto` link is free. You could probably get away with zapier or something as well by being clever with your form target.

There's a lot of value in having one computing device on the internet that you control. You have a monthly cost, but every time something like this comes up you can juist "do the thing" on that machine and have zero extra costs.

You can get all kinds of bad solutions, and some great ones too. But usually the main issue with contact forms is not the tech. Companies just don't have good workflows, or the people, or resources, or the will, to properly deal with inbound contact requests

Sometimes, the people running the business don't even know they have a website, or that the leads are going somewhere, or how to get access to them

When you decide to take inbound contacts seriously, it's usually worth it to have some good tools to get in touch quickly and keep track of the interactions (like having the form be integrated with your CRM, and automatic callbacks - or click to call, triggered by inbound leads)

Sales drive a business, and it's true that some do really well with just the basics, like Google Sheets.

It shows that knowing your business and focusing on selling can be more important than tech at the start.

Yet, as you grow, tech like CRM systems can make scaling smoother.

Here's what I use

- tally.so forms, can embed anywhere

- cloud function (gcp)

- sendgrid (adds to contact list)

Unless you're getting hundreds of contacts a day this setup is basically free.

Demo:

https://500k.agency/mba-interest

Source

https://github.com/500k-agency/functions/blob/master/functio...

Yeah that works, but OP's point is that that's way more work than it needs to be.

I was just considering how to solve a similar problem and saw your reference to tally.so which works great! Thank you.

There are several moving parts to consider: server to receive the request (or an online function); handle denial of service attacks; handle spam and abusive responses; delivery to a person (message/email).

Someone has to set this up, maintain it, and pay for it.

Some providers such as Cloudflare seem to make this painless but I haven’t tried it myself.

This is just for my personal website. It is mostly the SPAM. I started with the usual simple `contact.php` that emails me when someone fills the form. Then for the longest time, Wufoo[1] (a hosted service) took care of my contact form but I could no longer deal with the spam. I tried Formspree[2] as the free tier API works good enough for my personal use. Then stop dealing with it due to spam, again. I remember using Tally[3] but gave up and ended up with a `mailto:` and asking Cloudflare to obfuscate[4] the email for robots. I just no longer deal with forms, or comments on my website -- just that -- a personal choice.

Forms are the de-facto use cases for any web property. It looks and functions simple but someone has to maintain it and keep up-keeping it. It is no longer simple.

1. https://www.wufoo.com

2. https://formspree.io

3. https://tally.so

4. https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/scrape-shield/em...

There's probably a very easy way to do it with cloudflare functions and github pages, but the problem is that everybody's stack is different.

Why not just use Google Forms? Our website uses it.

1) You can customize it and add your company logo/image. Can also limitedly change colors to match your branding.

2) It can be set to notify you of new submissions (ie each time someone fills it and submits it, you get an email)

3) It’s free and easy to set up.

4) You get a link which you place behind a ‘Contact Us’ text on your website. When users click it, it opens up the form.

Usually the website already exists. I fought with the same problem and even the cheapest service was charging a really high 5$/month,which immediately loses me as a customer, because that's the price of a vps and at that point I can do it. my solution was a gcloud function that disables functionality if billing reaches a certain threshold (the free tier limit), but if I had to pay 20 bucks per year, I would have, but nope, everybody charging more than a vps.

This is relatively easy to setup with Cloudflare Pages [1]. It was even easier with PHP 20 years ago, but spammers ruined it.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/plugins/ma...

> every "simple" form API service ends up being an oil tanker's worth of extras for having to justify being a paper-thin middleware that charges $10-$100 per month.

There is IMHO no viable market for a simple and cheap endpoint to save arbitrary data somewhere.

If you're competing for people with little technical skills and need a simple and "dumb" service, they are captive to you and you can charge more, albeit in exchange for a more polished experience. You also need extra for the support costs and marketing etc.

Targeting savy technical users is a losing proposition as they can build it for cheap enough (or reuse part of some other service provider's infra for that purpose), so you need to either be dirt cheap and that's no sustainable business, or be enterprise grade.

Back in the day it was common to use <form action="mail to:me@domain.com">. Then the spammers came along. My poor 10MB ISP mailbox couldn't take it.

Fond memories of using mailto. Spammers really ruined the internet for all of us.

Have you tried embedding a Google form into your website? It looks best if you're already using material design.

# First, a winding discourse

I agree, it is frustrating to have super fancy things available, but not the basics.

- To me, a key would be not just getting it done (at any cost), but not being obnoxious about it in some way (a concept about which people probably have different ideas/ideals).

- For this kind of product, IMO, there are a bunch of boxes to tick, and nobody is really executing superbly in the area.

- A weird market for sure; does micro reflect macro here somehow?

Sure, there are solutions, but, as you seem to indicate, a lot of them can have an off taste.

In my view, the answer used to be Tutanota Secure Connect, but that was discontinued [0]. (Not the cheapest, but a good product.)

- Thus, as a sub-niche of contact forms, there is currently a small but certain UNFILLED market opportunity for "hosted E2EE web forms". The requirements, though, are several: a good product with a slightly mature set of features, a company that seems like it has its priorities as straight/clear as can be expected, a product/company that won't fizzle out overnight, and expertise in security/etc.

# Possible solution

What's the (micro) startup on HN that was offering something like "user data hosting API, built for the long haul--cheap, sustainable, out of your mind/worry, built in Washington" or some such? I forget the name, but it seemed solid, though I can't find it in search easily. I think, for DIY, that might be a decent option, but it is still "build your own page, submit to our API" in some regard, and not "get a hosted customizable web form page", which would be my personal preference.

EDIT: Found it, UserBase [1, 2, 3] was the possible suggestion. Does this come close to helping somehow?

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/16ik6ni/closest_r...

[1] https://userbase.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22145168

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869472

I host Wordpress on a $10/year VPS and it wasn't hard to add a contact form...

Where do you find such a cheap VPS? :)

I host in AWS S3 and have plans to use a simple lambda.

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