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Ask HN: 2023 way to do contact form

5 points by abalashov ↗ HN
I'm about to launch my revamped business web site; the old one got blown away along with a cancelled dedicated server in a colo, backups forgotten.

I'm a little late to the public cloud party, you might say, but better late than never. I'm hosting the new site in an S3 bucket fronted by CloudFront.

My natural instinct would be to wire a contact form to a mailer running on the web server hosting the site, which, as we know, is so Jurassic an impulse as to be wholly ruled out in this brave new serverless world. Putting such functionality in Lambda gives me the sense of taking a labourious detour to reinvent some kind of wheel, since people with far less technical acumen are throwing up contact forms every day.

I have experience with some third-party overlay products for contact and engagement, e.g. www.livechat.com. Maybe I'll come back to that idea, but today I want a contact form that generates an e-mail, or perhaps calls a webhook/POST-back.

I'm embarrassed to say, I don't really know how to get a high-quality contact form going in a truly turn-key, serverless, 2023 way. Recommendations appreciated!

13 comments

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tpmx
First I thought: surely there must be an obvious effective and cheap way to do this. Then I googled a bit. Now I also want to know.
abalashov
Yeah. It's not that I didn't Google before asking. But I'm left just as befuddled.

I am clearly capable of solving this problem in a large variety of ways. What I really want to know is how everyone else is solving it, especially those who ain't got time for all that.

A key requirement of doing things "in the cloud" nowadays seems to be to divest oneself of any and all perceived non-core competencies, no matter how relatively trivial, sourcing anything that strays by so much as a detectable micron from the "core mission" from either from third party services or NPM dependencies.

Okay, I want to drink the Kool-Aid. How do I do it with a contact form? ;-)

surprisetalk
I host DreamDaddy on Cloudflare Pages (like S3), and use a Cloudflare Worker (like a lambda) to email myself contact submissions. Cloudflare is free and "just works" -- I have not liked my hodge-podge experiences with AWS, especially for simple projects.

I've also found that people are generally pretty happy to schedule short meetings. I've personally had a very good experience with calendly! I've posted my schedule as an example below. Feel free to say hello :)

[1] https://dreamdaddy.io

[2] https://calendly.com/taylor-town/30min

abalashov
That's informative, thank you. I didn't know about Cloudflare Workers or how relatively turn-key they are compared to Lambda.
surprisetalk
I really can't say enough good things about Cloudflare's ecosystem!

Specifically with workers, you can send unlimited emails for free, which is great for plugging into your existing workflows.

Another nice thing about Workers is that they can sit in your codebase as JS files alongside your front-end code and auto-deploy when you push changes to Github/Gitlab/etc.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...

[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/ci-cd

dieselgate
Am curious on this topic and am in a similar situation with a droplet - but am running a rails app so it's more a solved problem (though I've not worked directly with rails mailers in the past). Which stack are you using for this? that may help folks direct you to a solution if it makes a difference
abalashov
Just a static HTML front page laid out with Bulma. Avoiding any sort of JS framework injection, although it is tempting, as a Vue user.
1xdevloper
After spending a lot of time researching this for one of my websites, I found Tally forms [1] to be a great fit.

[1] https://tally.so

abalashov
Thanks for the rec! It seems a little heavyhanded for my needs; I've got the HTML/CSS built, just need somewhere to send the data.
kgodey
I'm using https://formspree.io/ with our new static website. I put the form URL as the action attribute in the HTML form tag, and it just works.