Show HN: Contact Form Delivery

[stanmancan]

Most sites I work on have at least one contact form and I got tired of building out the logic to send them and handle the spam into every project.

I built and launched Sendfly for myself 5 years ago and it's been a rock solid service that I've relied on ever since.

Recently I've done a full re-write, simplifying the product and making it super affordable. I wanted to share it here in case it comes in handy for someone else.

There are lots of competitors out there but I found them too expensive for my needs. For $15/year you get unlimited forms and 5,000 form submissions every year. Hoping that fits the bill for developers like me!

[rodolphoarruda]

This must be the most pragmatic "to-the-point" landing page I have ever seen. Logo, CTA button, value prop, sample code that explains the whole thing in a simple way, pricing, contact-us _à la_ eat your own dog food. Amazing.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

I think it goes a bit too far that way. Some minimum info I'd want to have before buying would be:

1) How do I consult the data that's submitted through the form?

2) What is the privacy policy: what's going to happen to my clients' data? Where are the servers hosted?

[ume]

I happened to need exactly this and was putting off coding it up myself. Signed up and was testing a live set-up within minutes. Very nice!

[djbusby]

Did you buy tho?

[samwillis]

Lovely implementation.

There are a few of these about, having started playing around with making websites in the late 90s I have fond memory’s of “Matt’s Script Archive”. He had both a Perl CGI script for this and a separate paid hosted version. Just checked, and it’s still running 25 years later! https://www.formmail.com/

Looks like you are going for roughly the same price point as that old classic.

http://www.scriptarchive.com/

[acidburnNSA]

Good old formmail! Takes me back to my middle school web master days. I spent a lot of time in frontpage and invested much time in figuring out how to make my own custom animated gifs.

[stevekemp]

Matt's Script Archive was a great source of inspiration when I was writing Perl CGI scripts, back in the day.

So much terrible code, and security holes, but still the name gives me a nostalgic feeling rather than the memories of all the times things failed horribly!

[KevinGlass]

Personally I dislike using contact forms. If the email address is shown I’ll just use that. Some people say you’ll get spammed that way but that hasn’t been my experience. These days unless a client specifically requests a form I will use a simple mailto: link and avoid the hassle.

[stanmancan]

I find myself reaching for both depending on the situation. I usually prefer to list an email address instead of a generic "Send us a message" form but there are lots of times when I (or a client) wants to collect specific information; in those cases contact forms are great.

[pentagrama]

For a client I used a free WordPress plugin WP Forms [1], for free you can create unlimited forms, receive unlimited messages, build forms with a nice UI [2] and you own all the data/don't call third party services. Recommended.

Yes, it works only on WordPress, in my use case, my client had a non-WordPress site, and we make a Help site on help.domain.com with WordPress, and the contact form on help.domain.com/contact.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpforms-lite/

[2] https://youtu.be/H5t3Zkx8ccc

[dmje]

The issue with forms is twofold.

The first is the UI - the design, logic, etc. Any reasonable form builder will give you this.

The bigger issue is the deliverability aspect. This to me is the killer. Having to setup all the stuff around email deliverability is a horror - SPF, DKIM, DMARC - then monitor. It's awful, and it's especially awful if you're doing it on behalf of multiple clients.

[dpcan]

Some hosts will require that you also install an SMTP plugin and use a 3rd party service like Sendgrid or Mailgun to authenticate and send the messages. If you have a professional web developer to help, this is usually fine, but if you don't, then this step will often times stop people in their tracks.

[onphonenow]

Many Wordpress plugins have lite and paid versions - and often do a bad job around spam etc

[ugh123]

I'm not sure what specifically you're selling me here. Is it a form that looks like your 'Get in touch' form at the bottom? How do I customize it (if i'm not a coder)? How do you handle spam/bots? How does it send it to me? via email? fills a spreadsheet?

> Includes every feature we offer plus unlimited forms and 5,000 form submissions a year

What are the other features?

[stanmancan]

You’d need to some some basic HTML to use it. You can add whatever fields you want to the form and post it to our endpoint like in the example.

We have some built in spam protection; a secondary confirmation after the forms submitted.

The form gets emailed to you but you can also view it on your account.

Tons of great questions; I’ll look at adding a FAQ to the landing page to give a bit more detail!

[mirod1]

I like it. It's simple enough to add to a form from a template, and doesn't get in the way.

2 things I would like:

- customize (translate, actually) the "I am not a robot" text, since I do work for non-English customers,

- have the "redirection" be just a pop-up window. My use case for Sendfly would be for 1 page brochure sites, and I'd very much like those sites to really be 1 page. Maintaining 2 pages is a lot more work than a single one, especially if I update them very, very infrequently.

I may end up using it as is, it would improve some of those sites anyway.

[dyeje]

Hey I think I’m in your target market for this, I like to test ideas with landing pages and provide a contact form. All I really want is the ability to email myself the info from the form. In the past I’ve set up free ConvertKit or MailChimp accounts, but it’s kind of a pain and way overkill.

Anyway, when I’m on your landing page I have 3 questions:

1. What happens when the user submits the form, how do I access the data / know about new submissions?

2. Am I able to customize the fields?

3. What happens if I go over 5000 submissions?

[stanmancan]

Awesome feedback; thanks. I'll work on updating the landing page to answer those questions, but for the time being.

1. What happens when the user submits the form, how do I access the data / know about new submissions?

When you setup a form you tell us who you'd like the form emailed to. When the forms submitted, we'll email that address the contents.

2. Am I able to customize the fields?

Absolutely! You're in full control of the form itself; what fields are there, how it's styled, where it's hosted. All you need to do is set the forms action to your sendfly.io url so that when the form is submitted it gets posted to us.

3. What happens if I go over 5000 submissions?

I haven't quite figured out that path yet; right now you'll just keep getting the submissions. I'll work on adding different plans, but wanted to keep it simple at launch. If you're interested and know you'll need more than 5,000 submissions let me know and we can work something out!

[binwiederhier]

Oh I remember this. I used a service like this 20 years ago when I started programming and didn't know how to host dynamic content (only static HTML). Back then they were free, called form2mail or similar, and worked exactly the same way.

Throws me back. I'm sure people these days will need it too, with all those static sites out there.

[unfocused]

I was just searching for a contact form last spring and was researching this area.

My Wordpress site is for a non-profit, and I am volunteer, but they were willing to give some cash for it. In the end, I went with Contact7, a free Wordpress Plugin and Flamingo (another plugin) that lets you export the data that people enter into the forms, as an excel file.

My use case was that we wanted to have people register, and we knew we would only have 10 people register, per year! So immediately, paying a fee for this was not really worth it since the volume is not there, and my client said there were happy not paying, and just making the people print a PDF to email back. I said let's just do these as forms.

As for feedback, I echo what some people said about adding what happens to the information once it's submitted, and can it be exported into a friendly CSV. Even for someone like me that only had 10 entries, it was helpful. If you are hitting 100s and 1000s, you definitely want to track all of that.

You should also have a look at the pricing of WPForms (https://wpforms.com/pricing/), which is a paid Wordpress Plugin, obviously with a crazy amount of features, but it's still good to look at them to see how they differentiate.

In addition, is your $15 just for one site, or can I use your service on say, 2 sites if I run 2 (or more). I would add that to the front page.

[stanmancan]

Good feedback, thanks. I think an export feature is helpful.

I'll be working on making it more clear, but form submissions get forwarded to the email specified on the form. So if you're putting the form on your sales page, you could forward it to [email protected]. All submissions are also viewable on sandfly.io.

$15/year for unlimited forms and 5,000 submissions, so you can have as many forms on as many sites as you'd like!

[laundermaf]

One of many, existed since at least 2013. The most popular one went bust since it was free and many more were born, bought and died since.

It’s good to keep seeing alternatives though since the lifespan of such services isn’t very long.

I myself ended up making my own version on AWS Lambda and SES and that worked well for 7 years without a change. This pattern is so common I think an example lives on AWS’ own help site.

[tbossanova]

You have a typo in your own contact form, “hestiate” should be “hesitate” :)

[stanmancan]

Appreciate that; fixed!

[hemantv]

I love this. Simple and to the point.

You can have free tier of 100 submissions a month which will let people have a taste of service before they are ready to buy. Suggestions about soft limit can applied here to drive more people to convert to paid plan.

Also can add a premium plan which remove the backlink.

[diceduckmonk]

> $15... 5,000 form submissions a year.

Do you account for spam detection and bots that would exceed that quota?

[stanmancan]

Yes it only counts submissions that make it past the spam protection

[quickthrower2]

This is why I like Wordpress, stuff like this is a simple plugin install away. Caching, analytics, forms, membership sites etc. can all be set up as free plugins (you can pay for more advanced features though).

[XCSme]

I do think that over time, my WordPress sites saved me a lot of time compared to the custom-built ones. On my custom sites I use a similar service to sendfly: https://web3forms.com/

PS: I emailed you regarding WordPress and https://wplytic.com, I hope it's ok.

[surjithctly]

I made https://web3forms.com/ which solves the same problem. No signup needed. It just works.

Good luck with yours.

[iLoveOncall]

I find the pricing a bit odd.

5,000 submissions is not an amount where I would consider paying, but at the same time it's also 13 contacts a day which isn't nothing for sure.

Basically not enough to pay for but still not insignificant.

The total cost for you is $0.05 a month if you use AWS SES, so I think a limit of 20 or 50K a year will basically not change the cost for you but will make the pricing more "coherent".

[stanmancan]

Keep in mind it’s $15/year, so only that’s only $1.25/m.

Realistically I can probably raise the limits since most people won’t come close to using the 5,000 a year. I don’t use SES and my email provider is a lot more expensive expensive ($1.25-0.85/1000 depending on volume) but I’ve had zero deliverability issues with them so I’m happy to pay a bit more.

[vidyesh]

Congrats on the launch, at some point I too considered building something like this but after a quick research I realized there is a very popular free service and a freemium service which does exactly the same.

I genuinely want to know from you (and others) whats the motivation to build something like this which already exists, which doesn't have a unique feature either.

[stanmancan]

Honestly? It’s usually just for fun and a learning experience. When I first built Sendfly in 2017 I had a need for it, didn’t see any options I liked, and built it in a weekend. This time around I’m learning Elixir/Phoenix and re-wrote Sendfly as a learning experience. I’m going to run it anyways so why not share it with the word and see who else finds it useful?

Any of my limited success in life has come from my willingness to build things that already exist. The fact that competitors exist is a good thing; it means there’s already a market for the product. You just need to capture a small slice of an existing market to make a bit of money.

[harryvederci]

A possible nice feature you could add for your customers is an "email copy to sender" option.

Reason: One major annoyance I had on the website of a letting agency was that they had a form where you could post issues with the home you were renting. But then you'd get no confirmation email of (1) the fact that you posted a message and (2) the content of your message.

[dividuum]

Not OP, but while that sounds like an easy feature to add, suddenly the form might me used to spam, flood or otherwise annoy other email addresses.

[stanmancan]

This would be a great feature but I’d have to think through the implementation. Right now we have no way to know which field to use as a “reply to”. I van look into documenting a set of special field names that have additional functionality.

[hidelooktropic]

I had this idea back in 2014 but because I'm a coder, not a business guy I just sort of moved on despite it being a little popular for a while. https://adamgrant.me/development/mailtoninja

[tyingq]

The only anti-bot thing I see is the confirmation after you submit a form, which seems to be just clicking a button. Having run some ecom sites with contact forms before, I'm skeptical that's enough. Do you have some plans to improve the anti-bot measures?

[stanmancan]

I'll be keeping an eye on it for sure and adding additional protection features as necessary.