Show HN: GitForms – Zero-cost contact forms using GitHub Issues as database

Posted by lgreco 1 day ago

Counter39Comment28OpenOriginal

got tired of paying $29–99/month for simple contact forms on landing pages and side projects (Typeform, Tally, etc.).So I built GitForms: an open-source contact form that stores submissions as GitHub Issues.How it works:Form runs on your Next.js 14 site (Tailwind + TypeScript) On submit → creates a new Issue in your repo via GitHub API You get instant email notifications from GitHub (free)

Zero ongoing costs:No database, no backend servers Deploy on Vercel/Netlify free tier in minutes Configurable via JSON (themes, text, multi-language)

Perfect for MVPs, landing pages, portfolios, or any low-volume use case.Repo: https://github.com/Luigigreco/gitforms License: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 (non-commercial only – fine for personal projects, not client work).Curious what HN thinks: would you use this? Any obvious improvements or edge cases I missed?Thanks!

Comments

Comment by cxr 1 day ago

GitHub is not Git. This doesn't really have anything to do with Git at all. This shouldn't be called GitForms.

The Git trademark policy says they don't want people to name things like this.

> you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service

<https://git-scm.com/about/trademark>

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 22 hours ago

so what about formsgit ? Would it be allowed perhaps?

Comment by moralestapia 13 hours ago

>This shouldn't be called GitForms.

Good luck on that hill.

Meanwhile, OP's project goes brrr.

Comment by bigyabai 8 hours ago

> OP's project goes brrr.

OP's project runs on a metered Git service. You're basically proving their point, as cool as the project is.

Comment by Groxx 1 day ago

> (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia")

GitHub, GitLab, Gitorious (now gone)...

I agree in general, but I think this ship has sailed a ways out to sea already. I don't think essentially anyone thinks "GitThing" is "git's official Thing".

Comment by cxr 1 day ago

Now that's an oversight! Since the Git project holds the trademark here, they better make sure they do what trademark holders do and have licensing arrangements in place with GitHub and GitLab regarding their use of the trademark. After all, how could anyone even begin to think about the existence of a trademark policy without taking these two obvious examples into account?

Comment by Groxx 1 day ago

I mean. Is there any evidence SFC explicitly approved of those names? I haven't been able to find any. They've been in place for decades without apparent contest.

But it's a trademark, and trademark law in the USA is pretty constrained by "will an ordinary person likely be confused" and I can only come up with "probably not" counter-examples in enormous quantities (git-lfs? there are tons of git-prefixed things out there). Git™ is just used with git itself, in practice, and I've never seen anything else Git™-branded-and-prefixed by SFC that changes that.

I'm sure there's probably a court case or N that would make this a lot more clear, but it seems like a fairly safe established pattern in the industry, though it's best to respect SFC's request.

Comment by cxr 1 day ago

> Is there any evidence SFC explicitly approved of those names? I haven't been able to find any.

Yes. The trademark policy I linked to says, "Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements".

(But let's even suppose that it didn't say that and the answer to the question you're asking were "no". No trademark holder is required to submit their agreements for public review. So what does it matter that the ones with the trademark policy haven't sought you out to get your input (and blessing)? The general shape of these replies—including the willingness to spend effort arguing but none to eliminate the ignorance that you're stumbling into the discussion with—is grating.)

Comment by 23 hours ago

Comment by altmanaltman 1 day ago

How about email? Form runs on your (anything) -> creates a new email -> you get instant email notifications because it's an email. That's also perfect for MVPs, landing pages, portfolios or any low-volume use case. Why would I want to rely on a middleman or version control software for this?

If you know it's a glued-together solution that you'll have to rip apart if your program scales, why make it so complex in the first place?

Comment by o1o1o1 1 day ago

I believe this approach is superior because it minimizes reliance on GitHub as the sole backend provider.

You can utilize any mailing library in your backend to simply send emails or choose API email providers like Resend or Mailgun.

For spam protection, various providers are available, such as Cloudflare and Google.

> why make it so complex in the first place?

You're completely justified in questioning this, and I resonate with you and all the developers who feel the same way.

Comment by saulpw 1 day ago

How do you send an email from your static page?

Comment by jayknight 1 day ago

<form action="mailto:contact@example.com">...

Comment by cadamsdotcom 1 day ago

With a mailto: link.

Comment by e12e 13 hours ago

Ironically that would probably work on phones, where most people probably have an app for email (Gmail, Apple Mail) - but not so much on computers, where many just use webmail rather than an email application?

Comment by Fire-Dragon-DoL 1 day ago

That comes attached with a lot of spam though

Comment by slake 1 hour ago

Wouldn't this expose your github token to anyone in the frontend?

Comment by lbatchelor 1 day ago

Your landing page makes a lot of claims that are not true

- that the code is 100% mit licensed (it's not)

- that this is in any way gdpr compliant (there are literal rules around this)

- that your data is encrypted and private (it isn't encrypted? Unless being written in Italian is encryption now?)

- that they'll have 99.9% uptime (there is no SLA for vercel hobby tiers)

- "No middlemen. No third-party storage. Every submission lives in your GitHub..." (that is the very definition of third-party storage and a middleman)

Comment by tonypapousek 1 day ago

Yes, but a language model patted them on the head and said this was a good idea, may as well make it mission-critical infrastructure.

Comment by maddmann 1 day ago

Hahaha piercing through the llm infused haze.

Comment by 22 hours ago

Comment by TrianguloY 21 hours ago

I personally use Google forms for a very similar feature. You don't even need to display the google form itself, you can create your own and then perform a fetch.

I even have it connected to a google sheet and google scripts, to send me emails for entries matching some patterns.

Heavily depends on Google, yes, but for something free that honestly I won't care if stops working (like a prototype) I'm ok with it.

Comment by RadiozRadioz 1 day ago

Neat hack, but it's free until it isn't. I worry about building things that rely solely on the good graces of Microsoft. Recent Actions news can support that skepticism.

Good that you've positioned it for prototypes.

Comment by captn3m0 1 day ago

There’s a lot of prior art for similar usage: Utterances for comments, gists being used for JS-snippet platforms.

Comment by RadiozRadioz 15 hours ago

I would say that not all art is good art. This strikes me as a big stack of Jenga blocks.

Comment by hi_hi 1 day ago

Ha, I feel the pain. I built this a while ago to scratch a similar itch.

https://feature-refactor-for-cloudfl.first-contact.pages.dev...

It's no longer "live" so I wouldn't try and use it. I was using Supabase free tier to manage auth, and got tired of keeping it live. Good lesson learnt.

Comment by jyunth 23 hours ago

Pretty cool, goes along the same lines as Giscus, using GitHub resources to host comments. But after the recent moves taken by GitHub on the fees put on self hosted runners, I can't be too sure if these things will stick around for a long time.

Comment by lmssiehdev 1 day ago

I recently found out about utterances which allows you to use GitHub issues to host comments, and I instantly thought of how this would be a good use case for forms.

Glad to see someone executing on this, and I love how descriptive the landing page is.

Comment by jacobbennett 1 day ago

Looks cool! Good work. Seems like a great solution for a mvp.

Comment by nonameiguess 1 day ago

So, amusingly, a customer I consult for made a custom form submission application that is exactly this but creates issues in their private Gitlab rather than public Github.

It seems like you want to make this into some kind of viable business, and I don't mean to dissuade by any means, but this was a three-day project by a perfectly good guy, but one guy, extremely junior, that I was tasked with training on basic networking and systems administration duties. I don't want to speak ill of the man. I liked him a lot, but he was extremely hard to teach, could not seem to understand even the bare basics of how computers and the systems they collectively form when networked operate. But he could make this exact application, on his own, in a matter of days, before LLMs were a thing.

Not saying you can't manage it, but this is like trying to sell people sandwiches. Plenty make businesses doing exactly that, but you either need a captive audience or really good sandwiches, because most of the time anyone who wants one can make it themselves pretty easily.