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I'm launching many landing pages these days and want to collect emails into waitlists.

I have been working on Wait: https://github.com/tanin47/wait, a self-hostable CORS-enabled headless waitlist system that connects to Google Sheets.

I have many landing pages hosted for free on Netlify and Github Pages as static pages. All of them have waitlist forms that send cross-domain AJAX requests to the Wait server, which then writes the emails to Google Sheets. Since there's no iframe, it's easier for me to style the form and customize the after actions.

The Wait server is hosted on OVHCloud for $4/month. It's probably the most economical option for a waitlist system.



Is this solving the same problem as Netlify's forms? https://docs.netlify.com/manage/forms/setup/

I guess one advantage here is that the user is not locked into a specific hosting provider.


They are similar except that Netlify's Form transforms your forms into its own thing. This makes it more difficult to customize the after actions because you don't control the final code. Note that Netlify does offer limited customization of the after actions as you can see here: https://docs.netlify.com/manage/forms/setup/#success-message...

Any alternative that is hosted or uses iframe will encounter this kind of frictions.

In comparison, with Wait, you'd just call `fetch(...)` and do whatever you need after `fetch(..)` succeeds or fails. For example, one landing page might say thank you afterward. Another landing might show the installation instructions after the user submits their emails. The whole code is controlled by you.

It's like you call your own backend except it's hosted in a different domain, and your landing page can be hosted as a static site with no backend.

If you are interested in trying it out, I'd love to work with you to make it successful for you. Thank you!


Is there actually demand for this?

I did one that writes to a Notion DB and is hosted for free on Cloudflare. I don't think I bothered to open source it though.


It seems there are at least 2 users who need it ;)




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