About 7 months ago, I started building Formgrid alone in Ghana with no funding, no audience, and no guarantee anyone would care.
Today, Formgrid has 290+ registered users, 8 paying customers across Europe, Asia, and North America, and $86 MRR. Every single paying customer came from organic content. Zero paid advertising. Zero investors.
This is the honest story of what those 8 months actually looked like.
Why I Built It
I kept running into the same problem as a developer. Every time I built a landing page or a static site, I needed a contact form.
And every contact form meant setting up a backend, configuring email, handling spam, and maintaining infrastructure forever.
All of that overhead just to receive a message from a visitor.
The tools that existed either charged too much, locked basic features behind expensive plans, or stopped at the inbox. A form submission
would arrive as an email, and then what? There was no way to track whether you followed up, whether the lead converted, or whether
it went cold while buried in your inbox.
I built Formgrid to solve both problems at once.
Point your HTML form at a Formgrid endpoint, and every submission becomes a tracked lead with email notifications, Google Sheets sync,
follow-up reminders, and a conversion pipeline. No backend needed. No Zapier. No $90 per month Google Sheets plans.
What Formgrid Looks Like Today
Here is the form builder with landing page templates. Non-technical users can build a complete branded form page without touching
any code:
Every form submission becomes a tracked lead in the dashboard. New, Contacted, and Converted stages give you a clear picture of your pipeline at a glance:
You can add private notes to every lead after each conversation so you always know where things stand before you follow up:
You can change the status of a lead as you move it through the pipeline:
And you can set a follow-up reminder on any lead. On that date, Formgrid emails you with the lead details and your notes:
This is the feature that separates Formgrid from every other form tool at this price point. Formspree collects submissions. Formgrid
manages leads.
The Numbers After Almost 8 Months
I want to be completely honest here because I think most building in public posts either cherry-pick good metrics or hide the disappointing ones.
Here are the real numbers:
Registered users: 290+
Paying customers: 8
Monthly recurring revenue: $86
Indexed pages on Google: 42+
Monthly organic clicks from Google: 200+
Best single-day signups: 6
Product Hunt upvotes: 7
Reddit ad conversions: 0
Yes. Product Hunt gave me 7 upvotes and Reddit ads gave me zero conversions. I am including those because they are
part of the real story.
What Actually Worked
SEO Blog Posts Targeting Competitor Alternatives
This is by far the most important thing I learned in seven months.
The posts that brought paying customers were not tutorials. They were not niche use case posts about roofing companies or restaurant websites. They were comparison posts targeting frustrated users of competing tools.
My Formspree alternatives post has 159 views and brought my most valuable customer.
Annie is a San Diego event manager who was using a basic form backend and receiving raw data dumps that her 75-year-old ride manager could not read. She found my post by searching for Formspree alternatives,
signed up the same day, and upgraded to the Business plan at $29 per month within days after I built a custom email template for her endurance horse ride registrations.
That single blog post paid for itself many times over and keeps bringing traffic every month without any additional work from me.
The formula is simple:
Frustrated competitor user
targeted search your blog post is the answer = paying customer
I have now written over 40 blog posts following this formula. Every post targeting a competitor, alternative, or a specific pain
point compounds over time. Each one brings traffic permanently.
Personal Emails to Every New Signup
Every time someone signs up for Formgrid, I send them a personal email within 24 hours. Not an automated sequence. A real email from
me asking what they are building and offering to help them get set up.
Most people do not reply. But the ones who do often become paying customers. Jose replied and told me he needed file uploads for the design files his clients sent through his quote request form. He upgraded to Premium within days.
The personal email also means that when someone hits a bug, they know exactly who to contact, and they trust that a real person will fix it
fast.
Fixing Bugs Fast
Angeline was a bride using Formgrid for her wedding RSVP form. She found a bug where apostrophes in names were being corrupted
in the database. I fixed it the same day she reported it.
She did not just get a fix. She got proof that the person behind Formgrid actually cares about making it work properly for real people using it for real things.
What Did Not Work
Reddit Ads
I ran ads targeting developer subreddits for several weeks. Zero confirmed conversions. Not a single paying customer came from Reddit ads.
Organic helpful replies to people asking about form backends worked far better than paid ads in the same communities.
Product Hunt
I launched on Product Hunt and got 7 upvotes.
No meaningful traffic. One signup.
The honest reason is that Product Hunt rewards founders with large existing audiences. Without thousands of Twitter followers or a newsletter lists that, the launch ceiling is low, regardless of how well you prepare.
Product Hunt gave me a permanent listing and a backlink to formgrid.dev, which has SEO value. But as a growth channel, it did not work for me at this stage.
Niche Use Case Posts
I wrote several posts targeting specific industries like roofing companies and restaurant websites. They get almost no
views and zero conversions.
The reason is search volume. Someone searching "roofing contact form" is much rarer than someone searching "Formspree alternatives."
I stopped writing those and focused entirely on competitor alternative posts.
The Google Sheets Integration
One of the most searched keywords in my space is connecting forms to Google Sheets without Zapier. Formspree charges $90 per
month for this. Formgrid includes it on every plan.
Here is what the Google Sheets connection looks like once set up. Every submission appears as a new row automatically within
seconds:
The blog post I wrote about Formspree charging $90 for Google Sheets got 40 views on my blog and 50 readers on dev.to within
the first day of publishing. It contributed to my best signup day ever with 6 new users.
The Customer That Meant the Most
A developer from Brazil living in the UK replied to one of my survey emails. He said:
"I have also just realised you are a guy from Ghana who is challenging the big corps with this, so this also makes it very special to me.
Your family must be very proud of you. Now I want to help spread the word and help Formgrid towards greater success."
I was not expecting that. Most days, building Formgrid is just me and the code and music in my ears. Hearing from someone on the other side of the world, those who found meaning in what I am building from Ghana made the whole journey feel worthwhile.
He is a member of the Free Software Foundation and deeply values open source software. Formgrid is fully open source under the
MIT license is not just a feature for me. It is the whole point. You own your data. You can read the code. You can run it yourself
if you want to. No black boxes.
The Technical Stack
For anyone curious about how Formgrid is built:
Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite
Backend: Node.js, Express, TypeScript
Database: PostgreSQL with Prisma ORM
Payments: Paddle
Email: Resend
Deployment: Render with Docker
Everything is open source and self-hostable. You can run your own instance for free with Docker if you do not want to use the managed
version.
GitHub: github.com/allenarduino/formgrid
The Competitive Landscape
Formspree charges $15 per month for a basic form backend with no lead management. They charge $90 per month for Google Sheets.
Web3Forms charges $18 per month for their
Pro plan.
Jotform charges $34 per month.
The Pricing Decision
I recently raised the price of the Premium plan from $8 to $12 per month for new customers.
It was not an easy decision. At $8, the competitive comparison was already strong:
Formspree Basic: $15 per month
Web3Forms Pro: $18 per month
Basin: $15 per month
Formgrid Premium: $8 per month
But $8 felt too cheap for what the plan includes. File uploads up to 1GB, Google Sheets sync, auto-responder emails, up to
3 notification recipients, CSV export, and a full lead pipeline. That feature set at $8 was genuinely underpriced.
At $12, Formgrid Premium is still cheaper than every competitor while feeling like a real sustainable product price rather than something suspiciously cheap.
The 8 existing paying customers are permanently grandfathered at $8 per month. They trusted Formgrid early when it was
unproven. That trust deserves to be rewarded. Their price will never change.
New customers pay $12. Existing customers
keep $8. That felt like the right way to handle it.
Formgrid Premium is $12 per month and includes
1,000 submissions, file uploads up to 1GB,
Google Sheets sync, auto-responder emails, up to 3 notification recipients, and a full lead pipeline.
Formgrid Business is $29 per month and adds custom HTML email templates, unlimited Google Sheets sync, webhooks, and Zapier integration.
The lead pipeline is what makes Formgrid genuinely different from every competitor at this price point.
What I Am Working on Next
The focus for the next 6 months is simple.
More targeted blog posts. More competitor alternative pages. More platform-specific tutorials. Every post compounds on the ones before it.
The goal is $500 MRR by month 12. Based on my current publishing pace, the compounding effect of SEO is achievable.
What Building From Ghana Actually Means
I want to say something directly about this.
Building a SaaS product from Ghana that gets paying customers in San Diego, Europe, and North America is not easy. The payment
infrastructure is harder. The network is different. The timezone gaps are real.
But the internet does not care where you are building from. Annie does not know or care that the person who built her custom
email template is in Accra. She just knows her ride manager can finally read the registration emails clearly.
That is what building software is about. Solving real problems for real people. Geography is irrelevant to whether your solution works.
If you are building something from a place where people tell you it cannot be done, keep going. The customers will find you
through Google, the same way they find anyone else.
The Honest Summary
Seven months in. $86 MRR. 8 paying customers.
290+ signups.
It is not a rocketship. It is a real product that real people pay for, built by one person with no funding from a country, most people
do not associate with SaaS products.
The next 8 months will be faster than the first 8. The content library is growing. The domain authority is building. The product
is more complete. And I now know exactly what works.
If you are building something similar or have questions about Formgrid, I would love to hear from you. Reply in the comments or
email allen@formgrid.dev directly.
And if Formgrid solves a problem you have,
try it free at formgrid.dev. No credit card required.
Allen Jones is the founder of Formgrid,
an open-source form backend and lead pipeline.
He builds and writes from Accra, Ghana.