Form backend

A form backend is a hosted service that receives, validates, and stores or forwards form submissions on your behalf, so your website never needs its own server-side code. You keep writing plain HTML forms; the backend supplies the URL they submit to and everything that happens after the browser sends the data.

The concept exists because most modern sites cannot process a POST request themselves. Static hosts, site builders, and JAMstack deployments serve files - they do not run code when a visitor hits submit. Historically the fix was to bolt on a PHP mailer script or spin up a small server, which meant maintenance, security patches, and spam handling you had to own forever. A form backend moves all of that behind a single endpoint URL.

A complete form backend does more than accept data. It filters spam, enforces rate limits, records every submission, delivers the data somewhere useful (a spreadsheet, an inbox, a webhook), and retries when a delivery fails. The quality of a backend is largely the quality of those unglamorous parts.

SheetLink Forms is a form backend whose working destination is a spreadsheet rather than an inbox. Each form gets a permanent endpoint at https://sheetlinkforms.com/f/{token}; submissions are screened, then an asynchronous worker writes rows directly into Google Sheets or Excel Online through the official APIs - no Zapier, no middleman - with retries at 5 minutes, 30 minutes, and 2 hours and a delivery log in the dashboard. It is free during beta (invite required), and there are no per-submission fees, ever.

The full pipeline, from POST to row, is walked through on how it works, and you can watch a real submission land in a public sheet on the live demo.