Free Form Backend Plans Compared: NBForms, Formspree, Web3Forms, Basin

Every form backend on this list advertises a free plan front and center, and every one of those free plans quietly means something different. The gap isn't marketing spin so much as genuinely different product decisions — one service caps submissions tightly but keeps them forever, another allows five times the volume but deletes everything after a month. None of that shows up until the actual numbers are lined up next to each other.

Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash

The free tiers, side by side

Service	Forms	Submissions / mo	File uploads	Submission retention
NBForms	1	100	Not included (needs a storage credit)	Indefinite
Formspree	Unlimited	50	Not included	30 days
Web3Forms	Unlimited	250	Not included	30 days
Basin	1	50	100 MB included	30 days
Forminit (formerly Getform)	1	100	100 MB included	Indefinite

No single row wins across every column, which is the actual point — "free form backend" isn't one offer with five different logos on it, it's five different bets on which limit matters least to give away.

Submissions per month: the number everyone leads with

Web3Forms' 250/month is the highest free allowance here by a wide margin — more than double anything else on the list. Formspree and Basin sit at the other end at 50/month each, with NBForms and Forminit in between at 100. For a form that gets real, sustained traffic, this is the column that decides whether a free plan is viable at all; a form averaging even 10 submissions a day burns through a 50/month cap in under a week.

Forms per account: unlimited isn't free of trade-offs

Formspree and Web3Forms both allow unlimited forms on their free plan — genuinely no cap on how many separate forms an account can create. NBForms, Basin, and Forminit all cap the free plan at one form. That sounds like a clear loss for the one-form services until it's weighed against their submission caps: Formspree's unlimited forms still share one 50/month submission pool across all of them, so "unlimited forms" on the free tier means unlimited places to put a form, not unlimited combined volume. One form with a 100/month allowance and ten forms splitting a 50/month allowance are different products aimed at different situations — the first suits one form that matters, the second suits testing several ideas at low volume each.

File uploads: the sharpest split in this table

This is where the five stop looking like minor variations on the same idea. Basin and Forminit both give the free tier real file storage — 100 MB each, enough for a modest number of resumes or attached documents without paying anything. Formspree, Web3Forms, and NBForms all draw the same line in the same place: file uploads exist as a feature, but a free-tier form with a file field won't actually retain what gets uploaded to it. On NBForms specifically, this isn't a soft limit — the free plan ships with zero file storage allocated, and any submission that arrives with an attachment while unpaid gets the same treatment an over-quota submission gets: accepted, but with its data and files hidden from the dashboard rather than stored (more on exactly how that works in file upload form backend mistakes). A resume field, a photo attachment, a supporting document — any of these decide the choice outright if the plan has to stay free.

Retention: the difference that shows up months later, not on day one

Formspree, Web3Forms, and Basin all cap free-tier submission history at 30 days — after that window, older submissions are gone regardless of how few total submissions came in. NBForms and Forminit both keep free-tier submissions indefinitely; nothing about being on the free plan schedules a deletion. This is easy to miss when comparing free plans up front, since it costs nothing to look past — the difference only becomes visible the day someone goes looking for a submission from two months ago and finds it either still there or already gone, depending on which service they picked without ever thinking about this column.

Spam protection: the one thing most of these bundle in free anyway

Whatever else a free plan withholds, filtering junk submissions generally isn't it. Basin, Web3Forms, Forminit, and NBForms all run some form of spam protection on their free tier without requiring an upgrade — reCAPTCHA and honeypot checks on some, automatic server-side filtering by default on NBForms specifically (nothing to configure, running on every submission from the moment a form goes live). It's worth checking directly if this matters for a specific service not listed here, but among these four, "free" doesn't mean "undefended."

What changes after free: credits vs. a subscription

The five services split into two different shapes once a form actually needs to move past its free numbers, and it's a structural difference rather than just a price difference. Formspree, Web3Forms, Basin, and Forminit all price their next tier as a recurring subscription — monthly or prepaid annual, billed again automatically whether or not that month's usage looked anything like the last one. NBForms prices the same jump as a one-time credit purchase instead: buy a batch of credits, spend them at whatever pace submissions actually arrive, and nothing renews or bills again until the balance actually runs out. Extra submissions, file storage, team seats, and a hosted page all draw from the same non-expiring balance rather than each needing its own recurring line item. Neither model is objectively better — a subscription is simpler to reason about at steady, predictable volume, and a pay-once balance is the better fit for a form that gets occasional bursts rather than a constant monthly rate — but it's a real difference in how the bill actually behaves, not just a difference in the sticker price.

The rename worth knowing about: Getform is now Forminit

Getform, a name that shows up in a lot of older "formspree alternatives" roundups, was renamed Forminit in January 2026 — same company, same product, continuing service since 2015 under the new name. Comparison content that still says "Getform" without a note like this one is either outdated or working from a stale source; the product referenced here is the current one under its current name.

Free is a starting point, not a permanent plan

Every service in this table eventually asks for payment once a form outgrows its free numbers — that part isn't a competitive difference, it's how every one of these businesses works. What actually varies is which specific number forces that conversation first: a submission-volume wall that a busy contact form hits in week one, a file-upload wall that never mattered until a resume field got added, or a 30-day retention wall that only becomes visible once something old needs to be found again. Matching a form to a free plan means figuring out which of those three walls a given form is actually going to hit, not just picking whichever plan is free.

For what NBForms' own free plan includes beyond this table — spam filtering, a custom redirect, one notification address — see pricing. Setting up the form itself, on any of these services, takes one HTML action attribute; see the framework-specific snippets for the exact markup per framework.