Options for Handling Form Submissions Without a Back End

2 pointsposted 7 months ago
by adityavinodh
(devmatter.app)

5 Comments

baobun

7 months ago

Last time i was looking for something as simple as possible and available everywhere I cared I landed on ruby (not rails) CGI with Forms and hooked it up to whichever http server was lying around. I expect it to keep running with minimal maintenance in 20 years.

adityavinodh

7 months ago

That's great for most people. I wanted a little more - a notification on my phone when I got a submissions. Unfortunately setting this up is pretty annoying, and nobody else was doing it. They were only doing email and slack notifications which I didn't like as it just cluttered my inbox.

baobun

7 months ago

It's just as easy to have that CGI script call some webhook to send it to whatever push gateway, email, some chatbot, etc.

adityavinodh

7 months ago

I’m sure that’s easy. There’s a bunch of services that use webhooks, email, slack etc. Unfortunately for an extremely simple dashboard to view responses and provides push notifications on mobile, I haven’t found any services. That’s I built a clean mobile app that provides push notifications. That way your email doesn’t get cluttered, you get notified, and you have a simple way to view responses without any setup.

It’s not for everyone, if you want to roll your own setup that’s great. But I intentionally built this for developers to give them full flexibility while still saving them time so they can focus on more important work.

adityavinodh

7 months ago

Forms are everywhere: contact forms, support forms, feedback forms, ...

For startups, it is important to monitor and quickly respond to events like sign ups or form submissions. This post explains the different options to handle form submissions without managing the backend yourself.