Yes, Formspree is free: the free plan gives you 50 submissions a month, unlimited forms, 30 days of submission history, and no file uploads, no API and no autoresponse to the person who filled in the form. There is no trial clock, and Formspree's own plans page describes the plan as "for testing and development". That covers a contact form that gets a few messages a week. It does not cover a launch, an event sign-up or a client site.
Everything below was read on formspree.io/plans and in Formspree's help center on 2 November 2026: the free plan in full, the paid plans and why search results quote two prices for each, what happens at submission 51, and when the free plan is enough. If the form sits in a page you host yourself, the last part lists the free alternatives, Hostus first.
What Formspree's free plan includes
Read on the plans page on 2 November 2026:
- 50 submissions a month, counted across all your forms.
- Unlimited forms and projects, and one team member.
- 30 days of submission archive in the dashboard.
- Two linked email addresses for notifications.
- 0 GB of file uploads. A CV or photo field needs a paid plan.
- Spam and safety: basic spam filtering, your own reCAPTCHA key, and restricting a form to your domain.
- Notifications by email and in chat apps: Discord, Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp.
What it leaves out: your own thank-you page (visitors see Formspree's), export, search and the Sheets, Airtable and Trello plugins, which start on Personal; the API and autoresponses, which start on Professional. Formspree's account limits page adds that it emails you at 50%, 75% and 90% of the monthly limit, and again when you pass it.
Formspree pricing in 2026: the four plans
| Plan | Price | Submissions a month | Archive | File storage | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 | 30 days | 0 GB | Email and chat notifications, basic spam filtering |
| Personal | $15 a month, or $120 a year ($10 a month) | 200 | Unlimited | 1 GB | Your own thank-you page, export and search, basic plugins (Google Sheets, Airtable, Trello) |
| Professional | $30 a month, or $240 a year ($20 a month) | 2,000 | Unlimited | 5 GB | 2 team members, API, autoresponses, webhooks and premium plugins |
| Business | $90 a month, or $720 a year ($60 a month) | 20,000 | Unlimited | 10 GB | Unlimited team members, your own email templates and sending domain |
Read on formspree.io/plans on 2 November 2026. Above Business there is a Custom plan with unlimited submissions, priced by contacting sales.
Why two prices show up for each plan. The page's plan list gives $15, $30 and $90 billed monthly, or $120, $240 and $720 a year. The price cards show $10, $20 and $60 a month: the yearly prices divided by twelve. So the accurate summary is "from $10 a month billed yearly, $15 billed monthly", and a snippet saying Formspree costs $10 a month is quoting the yearly rate.
What happens when a free form passes 50 submissions?
The form keeps working for the visitor; you stop receiving what they send. Formspree's help article "Over limit submissions" (updated 30 September 2026, read on 2 November 2026) says that when your account reaches its monthly limit, your forms keep working for visitors "but Formspree stops processing new submissions". It saves them without sending notification emails or running plugins, emails you when this starts, and holds them in an Over Limit folder next to Inbox and Spam.
Three details matter on the free plan:
- You cannot read them yet. The folder shows previews only: the first few characters of each field, and email addresses as the first letter plus the domain. Search and export do not work there.
- Reading them costs quota. To read one you reprocess it, and each reprocessed submission counts against the current month's limit. If you select more than you have left, Formspree reprocesses nothing. So you either spend next month's 50 on last month's messages, or upgrade: Personal gives 200 a month.
- They follow the normal retention. The article says over-limit submissions follow the same retention rules as the rest. Read with the account limits page, which gives the free plan 30 days of history, that leaves roughly a month to decide.
Separately, Formspree's System Limits page lists a form rate limit of 20 posts a minute on every plan; past it, a plain HTML form goes to an error page and a JavaScript form gets a 429.
Is the free plan enough for you?
It is enough if the form is a contact form on a personal site that gets fewer than 50 messages a month, email is where you read them, and nobody attaches a file or expects a reply by email. Or if you are testing, which is what the plan is for.
It is not enough if:
- The form is a waitlist, an event RSVP or a launch sign-up. One shared post can bring 50 entries in an afternoon, and the rest of the month goes to the Over Limit folder.
- The form has a file field. Storage starts at 1 GB on Personal.
- People expect an email back. Autoresponses start on Professional, $20 a month billed yearly.
- You need the data in a spreadsheet. Export starts on Personal.
- You run forms for clients: Free links two notification emails.
Formspree vs Web3Forms on the free plan
Both are form endpoints: they take a POST from a page hosted anywhere. Formspree is wired with action="https://formspree.io/f/<id>"; Web3Forms with an access key in a hidden field. On the free plan the difference is where the submission ends up. Formspree keeps 30 days in a dashboard and includes domain restriction. Web3Forms' FAQ says submissions are forwarded to your email or endpoint rather than stored, and its Pro features page, read on 2 November 2026, says the autoresponder, file attachments, webhooks, domain restriction, and reCAPTCHA or Turnstile "require an active paid subscription". Neither sends an autoresponse or takes files for free. Web3Forms' pricing page refused our request today, so check their site for its free submission number.
Pick Web3Forms if your inbox should be the only place submissions live. Pick Formspree if you want a dashboard without paying. And if the page can live on Hostus, you need neither: the host stores the responses itself, as the next section shows.
Free alternatives, Hostus first
1. Hostus
Best if the form lives in a page you host. Hostus hosts HTML files as links at your-slug.hostus.page, and any <form method="post"> whose fields have name attributes stores its responses. No action URL, no key, no backend, no script to paste. The free plan includes 100 responses a month across your account, and responses over the cap are kept, not lost: they arrive, wait hidden, and you see how many are waiting. The visitor's form never breaks. Subscribing ($9.99 a month or $49.99 a year) makes responses unlimited and unlocks the held ones, with no reprocessing step.
Per page you can close the form, stop it after N responses, get an email on every response, a daily summary or nothing, set a success message of up to 200 characters, or redirect to an https URL. A honeypot, a per-IP limit and a spam score send junk to a Spam tab you can review. CSV export is on the free plan, and when the form has an email field, the notification to you has Reply-To set to that address.
| Option | Free submissions a month | How you wire the form | Works on a page hosted anywhere | File uploads on free |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostus | 100 across the account; extra kept until you subscribe | Nothing: any form with named fields | No, only pages Hostus hosts | No |
| Web3Forms | Check their site | Access key in a hidden field | Yes | No, a paid feature |
| Basin | 50 on one form | Endpoint URL in action | Yes | Check their site |
| Netlify Forms | Unlimited on current credit-based plans; 100 per site on legacy plans | data-netlify="true" plus form detection | No, only Netlify sites | Check their site |
| Tally | Unlimited | Build the form in Tally, then embed or link it | Yes, as an embed | Check their site |
Web3Forms read on its own site on 2 November 2026; Basin, Netlify Forms and Tally as of September 2026, from each vendor's own pages. Check their sites before you decide.
2. Web3Forms
Pick it if the page lives somewhere else and all you want is the submission in your inbox.
3. Basin
Pick it if spam keeps eating your Formspree quota: as of September 2026, spam did not count toward its cap, and paid plans started at $12.50 a month for 250.
4. Netlify Forms
Pick it if the site already deploys on Netlify; the form only works there.
5. Tally
Pick it if you would rather build the form than write it. The form is Tally's, embedded or linked, not your own HTML; as of September 2026, Pro at $24 a month removed Tally's branding.
Moving a Formspree form to Hostus
- Keep the HTML as it is for now. Hostus leaves a form alone when its
actionpoints at another site, so it keeps posting toformspree.iowhile you test. - Check the field names. Every field needs a
name, as on Formspree. Its_gotchahoneypot field is treated as a honeypot. - Delete the action attribute and keep
method="post"when you want Hostus to take over. To keep a form out of Hostus for good, adddata-hostus="ignore"to it. - Upload the page. Drop the file on hostus.io, type your email and click the magic link. Or ask Claude to publish it through the Hostus connector.
- Switch the page to Public in the dashboard. Every page starts private.
- Send one test. A submission you make while logged in as the owner is marked as a test and does not count toward the 100.
Good to know before you switch
Hostus never emails the person who filled in the form, so put what they need in the success message. There is no file upload field: up to 50 fields, 4,000 characters per value. Under the success message Hostus prints a short "Form by Hostus · make your own" line, and every page carries a small "Published with Hostus" pill in the bottom-right corner, on the free and paid plans. Neither can be turned off.
The form only works in a page Hostus hosts. There is no endpoint to paste into a WordPress or Webflow site, or into a page someone else runs; for those, Formspree or Web3Forms is the right tool. The link is always your-slug.hostus.page, never your own domain, and public pages carry a noindex tag, so a contact page on Hostus will not show up in Google search. There are no Sheets, Slack or webhook plugins: responses reach you in the Responses tab, by email and as CSV, and Claude can read them through the connector. The free plan is 20 documents and 2 MB in total.