I got tired of paying for form backends, so I built my own

A buddy of mine does freelance web dev. Mostly small business sites -- restaurants, dentists, that kind of thing. Every single client needs a contact form. And every single time it's the same conversation: "Why am I paying $20 a month just to get emails from my website?" Fair question honestly. His solution was to rig up an n8n workflow that catches form submissions via webhook and dumps them into a Google Sheet. It works. Technically. Until a column shifts, or the webhook URL expires, or the client wants to see their submissions somewhere that isn't a spreadsheet. I kept thinking about this. A form backend is such a basic thing. You receive a POST request. You save it. You send a notification. Maybe you show it in a dashboard. That's it. That's literally the whole product. And yet Formspree wants $20/mo for it. Basin, Formcarry -- same ballpark. So around December last year I decided to just build the thing myself. The building process I should mention -- this was always a side projec