What is a form backend?
A form backend is a hosted service that receives your HTML form's submissions, filters out spam, stores the data, and notifies you — so your static site gets working forms with zero server-side code.
The problem: static sites can’t process forms
Modern sites are increasingly static — Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, or a Next.js export served from a CDN. Static hosting is fast, cheap, and secure precisely because there is no server running your code. But that also means nothing is listening when a visitor presses "Send" on your contact form. The traditional fix was writing and hosting a server endpoint (plus storage, plus spam filtering, plus email notifications) for what amounts to a few fields of text.
The fix: point your form at a hosted endpoint
A form backend gives every form a unique URL. You keep writing plain HTML — your markup, your styling, your page — and set the form’s action attribute to that URL. The service receives the POST, rejects spam, stores the submission, emails you, and either redirects the visitor to your thank-you page or returns JSON your JavaScript can handle.
What to look for when choosing one
Four things separate the options: how many free submissions you get each month (this ranges from 50 to 1,000 across the popular services), whether spam protection is included or gated behind a higher tier, whether submissions are stored somewhere you can search and export or merely forwarded to your inbox, and what the first paid tier costs when you outgrow the free one.
What it looks like in practice
This is a complete, working contact form — no JavaScript, no server, no build step. The only Crunchforms-specific part is the action URL:
<form action="https://crunchforms.com/form/{formID}" method="post">
<label for="email">Email</label>
<input name="email" type="email" id="email" required />
<label for="message">Message</label>
<textarea name="message" id="message" rows="4"></textarea>
<button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>Try it in two minutes
Create a form, paste the snippet, send yourself a test submission from the dashboard — 1,000 free submissions a month, spam filtering included.
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