Recently, I was looking for a free form backend and wasn’t able to find one. So I built one. But I believe I found an interesting way to do it!
I needed an endpoint to send waitlist submissions from my static website. As I quickly found out, most of the free options out there are artificially limited to a point where they are almost unusable - 50 submissions per month, no data export, unwanted redirects. And I understand - no matter how commoditized the technology is, a hosted solution can’t be entirely free. The service providers need to make money to maintain infrastructure, pay for emails, etc.
Of course, there are open-source self-hosted solutions out there but deploying them is much harder than signing up for their managed version. Again, I get it.
So I thought: “what if I there was a free self-hosted solution that is as easy to deploy as signing up for a commercial service?” And I remembered “Deploy to Cloudflare” buttons that are primarily used by Cloudflare in their tutorials/docs.
Meet FormZero - Form backend with zero paid features that you can deploy to your free Cloudflare account with one button in about 3 minutes. Cloudflare doesn’t even require credit card. It’s literally as easy as signing up for a SaaS:
1. Click the button
2. Provide three parameters:
- Project name in your account (just use “formzero”)
- Database name in your account (just use “formzero”)
- Auth Secret for auth internals (use jwtsecrets.com or `openssl rand -hex 16` to generate one)
3. Get your unique workers.dev URL where you can start using FormZero
1. 100,000 form submissions a day
2. 4,000,000 submissions stored
3. Infinite retention and data export
4. Email notifications with a free Resend API key
Just go and try how smooth the installation process is!