The main job of The Sizzle’s website is to convince punters to get a free trial of the newsletter. To do this, people submit their email address via a HTML form.
This form was previously hooked up to Zapier via a JQuery script I found on a random website years ago. Zapier takes the input of this form (literally just an email address) and sends it to ActiveCampaign where the action happens.
Now that I’m ditching Zapier for Integromat, it’s time to revisit the Sizzle’s form situation. In the period between setting up the original form and now, I’ve learned that I could have simply set a webhook as the form action URL. This sends the form data directly to Integromat with no middle-man required!
Unfortunately, the domain name Integromat uses was added to a DNS-block list used by NextDNS, Pi-Hole and various other ad-blocking/privacy products. If I was to call the Integromat webhook directly from my form, anyone using that blocklist would be greeted with an error message when trying to sign up for a free trial of The Sizzle.
As a result, I need a clean middle-man to handle sending the data and a webhook to Integromat. HTTP form endpoints as a service are that middle-man. You pay them a few bucks and they take the form input from your website and forward it on to where you need it to, or store the emails for you to manually process.
Here’s the stuff I need from a HTTP form endpoint:
- sends webhook with form data
- can disable email notifications of form submissions
- file uploads
- heaps of endpoints & submissions
- doesn’t store form submissions on their server
I did a bit of seaching and found a plethora of servives out there. These ones didn’t make the cut:
- FormSubmit, 99inbound - no file support
- KwesForms, Pageclip - needs JavaScript
- GetForm - only 5 endpoints ($32/m for $15, $82.50/m for unlimited)
- HeroTofu, StaticForms, FormTaxi, Formlets - no webhooks
- Formingo - dead project
- FormSpark - doesn’t support files natively
The following services meet all the other criteria except not storing submissions. This is normally the main reason people use these services, but because I’m passing them on to Integromat to handle, I would rather not have customer data stored in another location and then have to manage that data too (i.e: remembering to delete it or wasting time setting up a script to delete it!). All prices are in USD:
- Basin - $8/m, unlimited forms, 1000 submissions/m
- FormCarry - $180/yr, unlimited forms, 1000 submissions/m
- FormCake - $59/yr, unlimited forms, 10,000 submissions/m
Only three services met all my criteria:
- FormSpree - $216/yr, 20 forms, 2,000 submissions/m
- SmartForms - $126/yr, 10,000 submissions/m
- Web3Forms - $19/yr, unlimited forms & submissions
FormSpree and SmartForms are nice (SmartForms in particular I enjoyed testing), but it’s hard to go past Web3Forms at just $19/yr. It doesn’t have a fancy admin interface, and you can’t disable email notifications of form submissions (I just set a filter in Fastmail to send em direct to the bin), but it does exactly what I need and not a feature more.