First-party support, generous free tier (and cheap enough if you go over 100 submissions in a month), simple implementation, just POST to it like any other form.

A link to a Google Form is always my default.

In the past, I’ve built a very, very simple submission form. No validation, no error handling, etc. just a post to a simple server that dumps it in a DB. This was only necessary to meat some compliance requirements.

By filtering for a few keywords, you can get of 99% of the form spam.

Deliverability has never been an issue for me since (of course) I run my own mail server. But I doubt it's a serious issue when you take the little time it takes to set up DKIM etc.

I wouldn't make it more complicated than it has to be :-)

I added the simplest and most basic of captchas and so far I got 0 spam. It’s been online for months at this point.

Sometimes a stupidly basic solution works incredibly well.

> By filtering for a few keywords, you can get of 99% of the form spam.

Interesting, didn't think about it. You do this in the UI logic before the form is submitted? What keywords do you use?

> Deliverability has never been an issue for me since (of course) I run my own mail server.

Fair enough, I assumed this would be an issue so I never explored the possibility of hosting my own mail server.

There's also a bunch of SAAS stuff in this space, like UserVoice or Hotjar or Aha.

I think it's important to distinguish the frontend from the back here. The form shouldn't be intrusive, but that need not be related to the deliverability issue. Whatever service you choose, there's usually a way to hook up the form to the backend reliably (via API and real-time confirmations).

If you really want to DIY this, you can probably put the responses into a cloud serverless KV store for very cheap or free, instead of having an always-on server. But that doesn't seem any better than just using Google Forms or Airtable to collect those responses.

I think that would cause too much friction for something that should be a 5-seconds-or-less kind of experience.

> Or you can put a little feedback icon in the corner that opens a small popup to ask for quick feedback (or be dismissed).

Good idea! So far I've been adding a section at the end of my website that's a couple of scrolls in length. But I'm conscious people might not bother scrolling to the end.

> There's also a bunch of SAAS stuff in this space, like UserVoice or Hotjar or Aha.

I don't really want a complex setup, with user heatmaps and such; these are projects that have very limited features and likely to shut down in a few months.

> you can probably put the responses into a cloud serverless KV store for very cheap or free, instead of having an always-on server.

How would you set up the schema to store the data, while allowing for migrations that will probably happen quite often? One setup I've hosted involves a Go/Gin server with embedded SQLite on Hetzner using Caprover, which I felt worked quite nice. It's costing me about $5/month, which I need to spend for another server I need to host.

> that doesn't seem any better than just using Google Forms or Airtable to collect those responses.

Mind if I ask why? I think DIY is better than those because of the smaller friction in collecting feedback.

Just do what's easiest for you, I say this respectfully it is not worth your time agonizing over a feedback form. Your time is better spent looking for a problem painful enough that when something doesn't work, I feel compelled to send you feedback because I want the product to work.

I agree, it's not worth agonizing over the form before every single project. But I've done a few projects with feedback forms and I realised I can't answer what's the easiest way to do it, and it annoyed me. I'm glad I posted this question because I discovered much simpler solutions.

> when there are times I really want to give feedback I'll look for a contact email and just send it straight there

I wouldn't choose showing my contact email, it'll get spammed for eternity.

I don't think I'd agree with that, but that's just my intuition thinking a link is less annoying than a popup. I have no data to back that up either way.

But put it this way: A popup or embed annoys every single visitor, as soon as they show up. Very few of them will want to send you anything at all, but they all get annoyed. I know that every time I see a popup, my first instinct is to close it without even reading it. (I only suggested this because it's a very common pattern, often insisted on by product owners... but as a frontend dev, I hate floating things like that).

On the other hand, a link is a word or two I can quickly scan and ignore if I don't want to use it. If I do, I know exactly what happens if I click it... it opens.

Maybe a compromise is just to have a "Contact" link in the header (instead of the very bottom) that goes to a contact page with an embedded form. (Or a drop-down form if you really must).

> I don't really want a complex setup, with user heatmaps and such; these are projects that have very limited features and likely to shut down in a few months.

> [...]

> Mind if I ask why? I think DIY is better than those because of the smaller friction in collecting feedback.

To me that's all the more reason to just find some drop-in feedback widget. It takes like one line of code and 5 min to set up and it's going to be like 95%+ reliable. Someone else did all the design work, testing, CDN stuff, etc. If it's not core business logic for your startup, why waste time on it at this early state? It's literally just a text box for someone to send you a message. It could be a mailto link if that's easier.

The trouble with rolling your own is just that it's a hassle. You gotta do the frontend for your visitors and make sure the popup is responsive and has the right z-index vs everything else on the page, etc. You have to design a backend and make sure it's authed and protected from drive-by bots and such. You have to either be willing to parse entries in a DB/KV browser or else design a viewer frontend for yourself. That's like hours/days of work, in my mind, vs a drop-in one-line script (or a link), under a vendor's free or cheapest plan.

And if you want to accept files (like screenshots or recordings), it becomes quite a bit harder.

But if you really want to DIY it...

> How would you set up the schema to store the data, while allowing for migrations that will probably happen quite often? One setup I've hosted involves a Go/Gin server with embedded SQLite on Hetzner using Caprover, which I felt worked quite nice. It's costing me about $5/month, which I need to spend for another server I need to host.

I think this use case is simple enough you could do it however you want. If your app has a DB already, it can just write to another table there (with proper sanitization and and bot blocking, etc.). It does run the risk of bad actors damaging your prod DB, though.

If I were doing it, it'd be like a few lines of code in a serverless func writing to a serverless KV, like a Cloudflare Worker writing to a Workers KV: https://developers.cloudflare.com/kv/ It should be free up to 1000 writes/day, 1 GB of stored data.

The schema can just be something simple, like:

{ feedback_api_version: 0.01, email: "nicefellow@gmail.com", comment: "Hi, blah blah blah, I love your product but...." }

If you version it every time you change the schema, it should be simple to write an importer/normalizer in the future.

If you want to put it in a DB instead of a KV, go ahead. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that really needs its own server, but if you prefer that architecture and don't mind paying for it, why not? You can probably put it on a free plan somewhere ( Vercel, Firebase, wherever: https://gist.github.com/bmaupin/0ce79806467804fdbbf876197051...).

But it just seems like overkill to me. You're just reinventing Google Forms and Airtables, who already has all that done and tested and deployed and battle-tested thousands if not millions of times a day.

I've learned to become sceptical of 3rd-party services. They all promise to be "drop-in" and "5 mins till setup", but I often end up needing to learn their little quirks, just as I would if I rolled my own service.

> If I were doing it, it'd be like a few lines of code in a serverless func writing to a serverless KV, like a Cloudflare Worker writing to a Workers KV: https://developers.cloudflare.com/kv/ It should be free up to 1000 writes/day, 1 GB of stored data.

The Cloudflare serverless KV is interesting, but now that I've discovered the file writing option I think that's so much simpler. No need to learn how to use Cloudflare workers and KV, nor worry about free plan limits.

Thanks for the conversation!

If you actually mean a survey or a lot of questions with multiple-choice answers and nicely tabulated results, then yeah you probably want to just go with a 3rd party backend, or you will end up in a rabbit hole and ultimately reinvent one.

This data doesn’t need to persist forever. You could literally drop the table (after doing a backup) anytime you need to make a migration.

On deliverability, you don't only have to send them on, you can store them in a database and build an interface onto that. If you already have a backend system (eg Django and its Admin), that's easy. Great if there are multiple people handling emails.

The downside isn't running it, it's spam.

But for another client, I skipped forms altogether. Raw email address on the contact page alongside a WhatsApp link and a phone number. Will some people drop through the cracks? Maybe.

Definitely wouldn't want to share email/phone number though. I've done it before and ended up with spam.

Just using email is not only easier to implement, it is easier for the user to use, makes the user feel better about the process (web forms are almost always designed to prevent feedback: an email address might still connect to a ticketing system but mentally implies a human will read and triage the message), and gives them context and history for their message (as the user has a copy of what they sent in their client).

I'd nope out of there in a millisecond if a "give feedback" button would be a mailto.

E.g. over the years, Raidboxes.io has frequently answered to my questions on a Sunday, in the am, in less than 15 minutes. That's an outlier, but it has anchored my expectations for the future.

At the last startup I worked at we have tried to implement a similar responsiveness by utilizing a distributed team across the globe.

If you funnel your customer comms into one more or less decent system (most are different shades of crappy), it can work pretty well for both customers & team.

Downside is that I'm not able to gather statistics or additional info from form (such as os version, phone model, etc).

This should solve both aesthetic and speed (SEO) problems.

I built a Google forms prettifier: https://g.leftium.com/pretty

You simply have to "mimic" the Google form own your own site: https://github.com/Leftium/cloud9dancehall.com/blob/c17c5a66...

No attack surface beyond spamming the log to cause filling up of disk space. But you can limit this by setting a max POST content size in nginx and a rate limit then doing a logrotate on the host OS.

No moving parts to fail or maintain. Just pure comment form.

- use my Go/Gin server

- host as a Docker container inside my Docker Swarm cluster managed by CapRover, so I don't have to pay for a new VM

- given a request from a new origin, my server creates a log file with the origin name and writes the data

- given a request from an existing origin, my server appends the data to the file

- I expose an endpoint with an api key that serves all the contents of a file for a given origin

Let me know if I missed something out though.

I use Canny.io for some sites. You have to jump through a few hoops to enable their free plan, but it's decent. Honestly, the Google Form is simpler to setup and a better user experience.

Beautiful conversational forms.

https://youform.com/

Unlimited forms and responses for the free tier. Embeddable.

I also like to think myself as hacker and write blogs and launch apps.

And it made me realize the current offerings are ugly and not neat.

I'll love to get your feedback too.

How so?

If Google forms are ugly, write your own form that submits to the same endpoint: https://blog.webjeda.com/google-form-customize/