Static hosting plus Reachase vs rolling your own serverless form handler
Compare Netlify Functions, AWS Lambda, and managed form APIs for small websites. See why teams choose external form backends over DIY serverless.
Maya Okonkwo · Engineering
Every developer has considered writing a ten-line serverless function to forward form data to email. It looks simple in a tutorial. In production it means secrets management, rate limiting, spam filtering, retry logic, and a submission archive.
For a side project, that might be fine. For a client site or a product landing page you want to forget about, a managed form backend is usually the better tradeoff.
DIY serverless form handler
You deploy a function on Netlify, Vercel, AWS Lambda, or Cloudflare Workers. It validates input, calls SendGrid or Resend, and returns 200. You own the code and the infrastructure.
You keep full control and might stay free at low volume. You also own spam protection, storage, failure handling, key rotation, and the 2 a.m. email debug.
Platform-native form services
Netlify Forms, Formspree, and similar tools reduce setup time. Some are free at low volume. The tradeoff is often limited customization, iframe embeds, or lock-in to a specific host or vendor tier.
Reachase on a static site
Reachase sits between DIY and generic form SaaS. Your site stays static on any host. The iframe embed is customizable from the dashboard. Submissions go to a dashboard with search, export, and email notifications built in.
On Pro you add signed webhooks to Slack, HubSpot, or your own API without writing a relay function. Someone else runs the form backend. The page still looks like yours.
- Free tier: 1 form, 50 submissions/month, no credit card.
- Works on Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, GitHub Pages, and any static host.
- Spam protection and rate limiting included.
- Upgrade path to webhooks, API access, and scheduling without changing hosts.