Founded 2025 · Built by Balaji Nagisetty
Every static site eventually needs a contact form. And every developer building one faces the same friction: spin up a server just to handle a POST request, glue a third-party email service into a serverless function, or paste a snippet from a form-as-a-service vendor with opaque pricing and a markup-mangling SDK.
None of those options respect the original promise of static hosting: ship HTML, get speed and reliability, and avoid the operational tax of running infrastructure. W3Forms exists to close that last gap. Point an HTML form at our API, drop in an access key, and you get email notifications, webhook delivery, spam protection, and a submissions dashboard — without writing a single line of backend code.
W3Forms was started in 2025 by Balaji Nagisetty, a software engineer who has spent the last decade building distributed systems, payment infrastructure, and developer-facing APIs. After watching the same “wire up a contact form” problem appear on dozens of side projects and shipped products, the answer became obvious: this should be a primitive every developer can reach for, not a recurring chore.
The product is intentionally built and operated as a small, independent company. There are no growth-team dark patterns, no usage caps designed to push you off the free tier on purpose, and no lock-in. If you want to leave, your forms are HTML — change the action URL and walk away.
Reach out directly: sayhello@w3forms.com.
W3Forms is built around a few non-negotiable beliefs.
The submission path is sacred. When a visitor hits submit, we acknowledge it in milliseconds. The hot path performs zero Postgres writes — we validate the access key from a Redis cache, run spam checks, increment a usage counter, push the submission to a queue, and return a response. Background workers persist the submission, send the email, and deliver the webhook. The visitor never waits for SES, your server, or any third party.
Forms are HTML. No SDK. No client library. No build plugin. No proprietary attributes. Your markup stays portable across every framework and host: React, Next.js, Astro, Vue, Svelte, Hugo, Gatsby, Webflow, WordPress, plain HTML on Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages, or S3. If it renders HTML, it works.
Security defaults that don't hurt. Access keys are hashed with SHA-256 before they hit storage — we never persist the raw key after creation. Webhook payloads are signed with HMAC-SHA256 and a per-form secret so you can verify authenticity with constant-time comparison. Allowed-domain restrictions block unauthorized embedding. Honeypot fields stop the lazy 99% of bots without a CAPTCHA in your visitor's face.
Deliverability is solved at the platform layer. We send through Amazon SES with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment. That means notifications land in inboxes, not spam folders, even when a submission is forwarded to your team via auto-response.
Two Go processes do all the work. cmd/server runs the HTTP API on chi: it accepts submissions, serves the dashboard API, and exposes the public POST /submit endpoint. cmd/worker drains Redis-backed queues and handles email delivery, webhook delivery (with retries and HMAC signing), and rolling usage aggregation. PostgreSQL stores forms, submissions, webhook attempts, and billing state. Redis handles rate limiting, idempotency guards, queues, and short-TTL caches for hot lookups.
The frontend is Next.js on Cloudflare Pages via OpenNext — every marketing and docs page is statically prerendered, delivered from Cloudflare's edge, and ships zero JavaScript by default for content routes. The dashboard is a separate authenticated React surface that talks to the Go API.
Formspree, Netlify Forms, Getform, FormBackend — all decent tools. W3Forms differs in three ways.
The Free plan is genuinely useful: 250 submissions/month and 1 form covers most personal sites and portfolios. If your project grows beyond that, Pro starts at $3.99/month — a single fixed price for 10,000 submissions, unlimited forms, file uploads, webhooks, custom redirects, custom branding, dedicated support, and API access. No credit card required to start. See the full breakdown on the Pricing page.
Have questions, feedback, or partnership inquiries? Reach us at sayhello@w3forms.com or read the documentation for technical details.