Using a Minimal Privacy-Friendly Alternative to Google Forms

Problem

Most small businesses stick a Google Form or Wix widget on their website, which means that it's bloated and that businesses couldn't really control the data due to it getting sent through some third-party host.

Solution

I built a tiny self-hosted form using PHP and SMTP (with PHPMailer) that doesn't require any JS, where the submissions go directly into the owner's existing inbox. It can run under 25MB of RAM on cheap shared hosting or even a Raspberry Pi. The script can be plugged into any email provider.

In this example, I ran this PHP server on http://localhost:8080, and I submit the form to the email of the customer, which would be sent to the owner that's written in the PHP script I made:

Let's also check htop to see how much RAM this PHP server uses:

PID   USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
17882 lain      20   0  201352  22172  16084 S   0.0   0.3   0:00.03 php