Which free form backend gives you the most submissions?

Why the free limit matters more than it looks

A contact form on a small site rarely gets thousands of messages. It does get spam, test sends while you build, and the odd busy week after a mention somewhere. On a plan with 50 submissions a month, that is enough to run out, and most services then stop accepting messages or hide them until you upgrade. The visitor who wrote to you on the 20th may never reach you.

So the number on the pricing page is only half of it. The other half is what the service does once the number is used up, and whether it refills next month at all.

Free plans of 12 form backends

Two of the twelve, Splitforms and Formspark, count free submissions once for the life of the account. When they are gone, they are gone. Netlify is a special case: forms only work on sites hosted on Netlify, and its newer accounts share one pool of credits between hosting, functions and forms, so a busy form can pause the whole site.

What happens after the last free submission

This is where the services differ most. Splitforms, ShipMyForm, Formspark, Forminit and Web3Forms refuse new submissions. Forminit says plainly that they are not stored or queued. Formgrid pauses the form until the next month. Formspree and StaticForms keep the extra submissions but stop emailing them; StaticForms even shows your visitor the usual success message, so neither of you knows a message is waiting.

Formgong does not cut the form off when the free 250 run out. The first time it happens in a year, delivery continues on credit until the 7th of next month, up to 5,000 extra submissions, and you get an email when that starts. If you do not upgrade, new submissions are still saved, just not delivered, until you do. Spam never counts toward the limit.

Where the submissions can go on a free plan

On most free plans the only place a submission goes is your inbox. Web3Forms, Forminit, Splitforms and StaticForms keep Telegram, Slack, Google Sheets and webhooks for paid plans. Formgrid allows a one-time sync of 10 rows to Google Sheets on Free. Formspree's own pages disagree: its help centre says Slack and Telegram work on every plan, its plans table says they do not on Free. Formspark and Netlify allow webhooks and Slack on their free tiers; ShipMyForm and FormSubmit allow a webhook.

On Formgong's free plan every submission is emailed to you at once and can also go to Telegram, with buttons to reply or mark it handled, to a Google Sheet, and to up to 3 webhooks. For a one-person business that answers leads from a phone, Telegram is usually the channel that gets a reply within minutes.

Getting the form onto the page

A backend only receives the form. You still have to make one, and on a new site that is often the slow part. Formgong covers that step too, on the free plan:

• The form builder reads your site's address and gives the form the same colours, fonts and corners as the rest of the page. No sign-up is needed to try it.
• Ready form templates for contact, booking, quotes, orders and job applications copy into your account in one click, and AI can write the fields from a single sentence.
• 28 free website templates come with the form already connected, so a new site sends its first message the day it goes live.
• If the site was made with Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit or Base44, there is a guide for each, and an MCP server lets Cursor or Claude wire the form for you.

And if you would rather write the HTML yourself, any form that posts to Formgong works the same way.

What the person who wrote to you gets

Most form backends stop at delivering the message to you. Formgong can also write back to the person, under your business name, with replies coming straight to your inbox and no email service of your own to set up. On the free plan that covers a review request to each lead after the job, a reminder a visitor asked for, and adding people who agree to your Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo, MailerLite or Kit list. Formspree, for comparison, offers its Mailchimp plugin on its Professional and Business plans. An automatic reply to every visitor comes with the paid plans, Starter and Pro.

What a captcha adds to your page

No service on the list forces a captcha. But some lean on one. Web3Forms' docs mark its honeypot as "NOT RECOMMENDED" and point free users to hCaptcha with a shared site key. FormSubmit keeps reCAPTCHA on unless you turn it off. We loaded each widget into the same empty form in Chrome to see what it costs the visitor before they type a word.

The Web3Forms key pulled about three times as much as hCaptcha's own test key, about a megabyte, on every cold load. That weight lands on a phone over a mobile connection, on the page where you want people to write to you. Formgong checks spam on the server, so the default form loads nothing extra. If you want a visible check anyway, you can add Cloudflare Turnstile with your own key. The full method and raw numbers are in our captcha speed test.

Where another service is the better pick

FormSubmit needs no account at all, only your email address in the form's action, and names no submission limit. If you want a form running in two minutes without signing up anywhere, it is the quickest start.

What Formgong's free plan includes

• Build the form or bring your own. The form builder takes the colours and fonts from your site's address, with no sign-up; ready form templates copy into your account; AI writes the fields from one sentence. Any hand-written HTML form works too.
• Websites with the form already connected. 28 free website templates post to Formgong out of the box.
• 250 submissions a month on unlimited forms. Spam does not count. Once a year, a busy month keeps delivering on credit until the 7th instead of stopping.
• Everywhere you work. Email to up to 3 people at once, Telegram with Reply and Handled buttons, Google Sheets, Notion, and 3 signed webhooks for Slack, Discord, Zapier, Make or n8n.
• Emails to your customers in your business's name. Formgong sends them under your business name and replies come back to you, with no email service of your own to set up: a review request to every lead, a reminder a visitor asked for, and review emails after an order with your logo and colours. People who agree can also go straight into your Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo, MailerLite or Kit list. An automatic reply to each visitor is on Pro.
• No captcha needed. A server-side spam filter, a honeypot, allowed domains and a block list; add your own Turnstile key if you want one.
• Files and voice. Visitors can attach files, or record a voice message that arrives transcribed.
• Made for AI-built sites. A hosted form page and a contact button; step-by-step guides for sites built with Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit and Base44; an MCP server lets Cursor or Claude wire the form for you.
• See what the form does. Analytics for views, starts, conversion and where each lead came from, and an alert when a form goes quiet.
• One account for the rest. Customer reviews and an AI help chat that answers visitors from your own pages, with every message in one inbox. Data is stored in the EU.