Contact forms for Ghost?

A couple years ago, I got quite a long way into building a contact form builder. I got asked for contact forms regularly (and still do), and I thought building a builder was the way to go. I've changed my mind. You won't find one in my Ghost tools collection.

Why I'm not offering a contact form builder

• There are a lot of them already. The market is pretty flooded.
• What's out there is already pretty good. I could roll out a basic one today (been there, done that for my own site a while back), but what's out there typically includes branching logic and such. Sure, I could build that, but it doesn't seem like a high-value activity.
• Spam prevention is hard. Contact forms are vulnerable to all sorts of spammy submissions, bogus entries, and such. I'd rather let someone else deal with it!

What I recommend: The TL;DR.

• If you're already using another paid service that includes forms (Hubspot, Notion, Asana, AirTable, Moxie), those are worth investigating. If it gets submission data directly into your workflow, that's worth something, for sure!
• I was pretty excited to get Form Robin at $19/once. I used that for a while, but I don't love the branding (and orange really doesn't go with my brand purple). And it's just not quite configurable enough. Maybe I don't want your form title in my embed, hmm?
• My current go-to recommendation is Tally. Their free tier is enormous, their builder is nice, and although some customizations are locked behind their Pro tier, you can do a lot with what's in free. (I just wish they had the Arial font on their list.) Here's an affiliate link that will get you 50% off for three months, in the event that you decide you need their paid plan. 👉 Tally.so 👈

Let's see some forms in action, hmm?

Moxie

(Included with my $25/month plan, and not the reason I signed up.)

Moxie is my current client portal/task tracker/time manager platform. Here's an example embed. Note that to make it look like this, I needed to add some css override to the layout:

.v-application .pa-6 {padding: 0!important}
.v-application .px-2 {padding-left: 0!important}

I appreciate being able to inject my own css into the embed. But the problem I'm solving here is the obnoxious tendency of every form provider out there to include horizontal margins on their embedded form. No guys, I actually want my form aligned with the content around it. And I don't love overriding .px-2. It doesn't appear to break anything, but it looks general enough that I worry I've missed something.

Form Robin

(Purchased for $19/once on App Sumo)

I wanted to love it, since it was buy once and use forever. But, I don't? I used it for a while anyway. My biggest complaint is that I can't remove the title, which makes it much more obviously an embed, instead of part of the host page. Then there's the goofy margins. Out of the box, it uses 102px of combined margin and padding. I can override that like this:

<style>iframe {margin-left: -102px;}</style>

But then it's broken on mobile, so instead I'd need to sort out what their breakpoints and set margins for each, I guess? I looked. It was complicated. No thanks. There's also no control over the big whitespace below it and their branding is not subtle. (Might be fine as the last element on the page, but it's annoying me here.

The one thing I really like about Form Robin is the small notes below each form label. Those are nice. I tried to replicate them in Tally, but I don't have size control for them, at least not on the free plan.

Tally.so

(Affiliate link, but you don't need a paid plan.)

I'm able to turn off the title (yay!), and the padding is almost right when I choose to left align the content, and the padding situation is consistent on all screens so that I can just add some negative margin:

<style>
  iframe[data-tally-src] {margin-left: -8px!important;}
</style>

I don't love the branding, but I don't hate it to the tune of $29/month, either.

And there you have it. Today's thoughts on contact forms. Additional contact form provider recommendations are welcome in the comments, but spammy nonsense will be removed. If you're going to recommend something, please include cost and submission limits for that cost. Thanks!

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