Form Handler for Google Sheets

An open-source toolkit that pipes your static website's contact form submissions into Google Sheets — with email notifications, spam protection, and rate limiting. MIT-licensed, free forever.

📖 Read the tutorial: How to Build a Contact Form Backend for $0/Month Using Google Sheets — full step-by-step walkthrough with code snippets, competitor pricing comparison, and architecture deep-dive.

📢 Also on DEV Community — developer discussion and reactions.

The Problem

Freelancers and agencies building static sites hit the same wall: the client wants a contact form, but nobody wants to set up a backend for 5 lines of HTML.

Existing solutions charge monthly:

• web3forms Pro: $10/month for Google Sheets integration → $120/year
• Formspree: $20/month for file uploads + Sheets
• Formcarry: $15/month for 5,000 submissions

For a marketing site that gets 20 submissions a month, that's $120-240/year for a feature the client barely uses.

The Solution

Form Handler replaces all of that with a free Google Apps Script. Paste it in, deploy it once, and it runs forever on Google's infrastructure (free — 20,000 emails/day, unlimited sheet rows).

Features

• Google Sheets integration — submissions land directly in a spreadsheet
• Email notification — instant alerts for new submissions
• Spam protection — honeypot field detection + keyword blocklist
• Rate limiting — per-IP submission cap, configurable per hour
• Auto-responder — templated "thanks" email back to every submitter
• JSON + form-urlencoded — supports both content types
• Origin whitelisting — restrict submissions to your domains

Installation

1. Go to script.google.com and create a new project
2. Copy form-handler.gs into the editor
3. Deploy as a Web app (Execute as: Me, Access: Anyone)
4. Update the configuration object at the top of the script with your email and sheet name
5. Add the form from example-form.html to your static site
6. Replace YOUR_SCRIPT_URL with your deployment URL

Submissions now flow into your Google Sheet. Done.

License

MIT — you own the code. Use it for unlimited clients, bundle it with your agency projects, modify it however you want.

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selfloom — we build tools for developers who hate subscriptions.