Wufoo Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s
imjustcreative.com
imjustcreative.com
It’s not a cheap option by any means
Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)
If you have to rewrite your web copy to explain why $10 a month is cheap for a revenue-generating B2B application you have made a catastrophic error in your target selection.
You've led to another interesting point however, being that $10 per month is rarely a price point at which any but the smallest of clients would consider you an important vendor. Depending on your personal definition of Serious Business Clients (TM), you will likely encounter the somewhat complementary problem of such clients failing to connect value delivered with such a low price point (even at $199).
You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:
1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks
2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice
3) you actually know what a server is
4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"
5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient list
Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or security"?
Still, $120/year to enable a single web contact form seems excessive (his isn't free b/c it has more than 10 fields). You could embed a form from Google Docs for free.
(Though, seeing his massive form makes me want to close my browser window, let alone fill it out. He might see another jump in requests if he cut the fields down to 2... and then it would indeed be free.)
Web Forms Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s
I actually tried to use Wufoo because I like their back end and had heard great things, but for my UI I need to precisely control the form code on my site, and Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers). So, I handle the submission with my own code.
I don't think that's accurate. I recall when I was joking with Chris about slamming them with thousands of requests a day, he suggested I look into using locally hosted forms, and just sending the post to them. Since I was joking (and was really only doing maybe a couple of forms per day), I never actually looked into that option. But, I'm definitely having a flashback to that conversation.
The only option they offer which doesn't involve an iframe comes with a warning, "It will NOT submit to our servers. Because of limited resources, we cannot provide any support for helping you connect these files to your backend." (I'd post the URL but it's in a logged-in area of the site).
In any case, it looks like it's best if I stick with what I've got if I want to maintain error display... I have functionality in the form that's not possible to add with CSS, I'm using jQuery to set up ajax form submission / error display, and XPertMailer sends my messages through a gmail account on the back end.
Thanks for the info though.