Hey HN!

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

Here’s what FormZero gets you on a free Cloudflare account:

  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

The application is a Cloudflare worker that handles form submissions and serves a protected dashboard where you can see data you collected. The data is stored in a D1 database. I’m really looking forward to the public release of Cloudflare email service which should allow zero-setup email notifications.

Just go and try how smooth the installation process is!

https://github.com/BohdanPetryshyn/formzero