A free contact form API now makes $44K a month. Web3Forms took the long road

This story is based on public sources: verified revenue on TrustMRR, the Web3Forms website and Surjith S M's public profile on X. It is not an interview. Revenue figures were last checked on 3 November 2026.

Every website needs a contact form. Almost every developer has, at some point, wired one up to a server, a database or a PHP script just to get an email when someone hits "Send". Web3Forms removes that step, and it has quietly become a real business doing it.

The numbers

On TrustMRR, Web3Forms shows $43,870 in MRR from 3,188 active subscriptions. All-time revenue is $356,265, and revenue in the last 30 days was $45,167. Unlike most TrustMRR listings, its revenue is verified through Paddle rather than Stripe.

The listing says the company was founded in December 2020 in India and is bootstrapped. It lists about 412,000 users.

What it does

The pitch is in the name of the problem. Web3Forms lets you "receive your html contact form submissions directly in your email inbox", with "no server or backend code needed". The developer points a form at the Web3Forms endpoint with an access key, and submissions arrive by email.

The free plan covers 250 submissions a month, which is enough for most personal sites and small businesses. Paid plans exist for people who need more.

Free at scale

The business is mostly free users. Around 412,000 users and about 3,200 paying subscriptions means fewer than one in a hundred pays. That ratio would worry a venture investor. For a bootstrapped developer tool with low running costs, it is a distribution engine.

Each free form sits on a live website. Developers who use it once tend to reach for it again on the next project, and some of those projects grow into businesses that need more than 250 submissions. TrustMRR lists Web3Forms' Ahrefs Domain Rating at 86 out of 100. That is far higher than most indie products and reflects how widely the tool is linked and documented across the web.

Six years to get here

The founding date is the most interesting number on the page. Web3Forms started in December 2020, nearly six years ago. It is not an overnight AI-era success. It is a small, useful tool that a front-end developer kept running and improving until the revenue added up.

Surjith S M describes himself on X as "a front-end developer, maker & entrepreneur" and has about 10,000 followers. His product is used by far more people than follow him, a reversal of the usual indie story where the audience comes first.

The stack

TrustMRR lists Next.js and Tailwind CSS on the front end, with Vercel, Hetzner, Cloudflare and Paddle behind it. The listing also notes GDPR compliance and encryption, which matter when a product handles other people's form data.

Why it matters

Web3Forms is the kind of company that rarely gets a headline. It has no funding round, no viral launch and no AI angle. It is a free tool that solves one annoying problem well, run by a bootstrapped founder in India since 2020, and it now brings in more than half a million dollars a year in annualized recurring revenue.

Sources

1. TrustMRR, Web3Forms. trustmrr.com/startup/web3forms
2. Web3Forms website. web3forms.com
3. Surjith S M on X. x.com/surjithctly