This is my only grumble with WuFoo; ... the only option up from the ‘free’ is the $9.95. May not seem much, but ...it’s certainly overkill...
It’s not a cheap option by any means
Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)
Some people just don't work well with numbers, whereas if his plan was priced relative to something he valued his perception might change e.g "Double your leads for less than a couple of pints."
Right, but then you'd be telling your Serious Business Clients (TM) "Please, don't consider us an important vendor for your business, we're too busy looking for table scraps from unemployed college students who price everything in terms of beer".
If you have to rewrite your web copy to explain why $10 a month is cheap for a revenue-generating B2B application you have made a catastrophic error in your target selection.
Wasn't suggesting to you'd actually write a product schedule priced relative to beer (or anything else), but only that there are some who have difficulty connecting a figure with value delivered. This is more common than you'd think.
You've led to another interesting point however, being that $10 per month is rarely a price point at which any but the smallest of clients would consider you an important vendor. Depending on your personal definition of Serious Business Clients (TM), you will likely encounter the somewhat complementary problem of such clients failing to connect value delivered with such a low price point (even at $199).
All he needs is a single form that sends an email upon submission. It should cost him less than the equivalent of $10/month to learn how to do this himself.
That is the programmer way of looking at the world, particularly the not-paid-well-enough programmer way of looking at the world.
You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:
1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks
2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice
3) you actually know what a server is
4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"
5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient list
Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or security"?
That's true. It's easy to forget how difficult this would be without experience.
Still, $120/year to enable a single web contact form seems excessive (his isn't free b/c it has more than 10 fields). You could embed a form from Google Docs for free.
Yes, the title is misleading. Simply having a form where none existed before doubled his RFPs. No reason to think there is anything magical about WuFoo forms, although it is a good service.
Only for less than 10 fields. In his case, it's $10/month because he has more than that.
(Though, seeing his massive form makes me want to close my browser window, let alone fill it out. He might see another jump in requests if he cut the fields down to 2... and then it would indeed be free.)
Yes, it's important to note that the only previous way of getting a quote from him was directly contacting him. A lot of people don't want this. Also the forms makes it explicit what his costs are and what he is capable of doing.
I saw a ~7x jump in online enquiries when I added a simple contact form to the bottom of every single page of the e-commerce store I've been building. We went from about 2-3 online enquiries per week to 2-3 per day.
I actually tried to use Wufoo because I like their back end and had heard great things, but for my UI I need to precisely control the form code on my site, and Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers). So, I handle the submission with my own code.
Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers).
I don't think that's accurate. I recall when I was joking with Chris about slamming them with thousands of requests a day, he suggested I look into using locally hosted forms, and just sending the post to them. Since I was joking (and was really only doing maybe a couple of forms per day), I never actually looked into that option. But, I'm definitely having a flashback to that conversation.
If you can find it, do let me know. I was just working on this a couple days ago and looked into it extensively.
The only option they offer which doesn't involve an iframe comes with a warning, "It will NOT submit to our servers. Because of limited resources, we cannot provide any support for helping you connect these files to your backend." (I'd post the URL but it's in a logged-in area of the site).
If you actually need to change the markup on the form, then your only option would be to use our API to submit the data to our servers. Joe is correct in that we do have embedded methods that reduce the load on our server and allow you to handle the initial page load, but we do not have a method that allows you to use your own HTML (but you can use your own CSS). Posting to our servers DOES work, but if there are errors on submission they would be shown to the user on the hosted version of your form.
OK. I didn't see any mention of the API in the 'Code Manager' section and didn't think to search specifically for it.
In any case, it looks like it's best if I stick with what I've got if I want to maintain error display... I have functionality in the form that's not possible to add with CSS, I'm using jQuery to set up ajax form submission / error display, and XPertMailer sends my messages through a gmail account on the back end.
Kevin is an occasional contributor around these parts. I'll ping him to mention that there's a discussion going on about them. He might have something to say on the subject.
It’s not a cheap option by any means
Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)