When someone fills in your contact form and taps Send, what they typed does not stay on your website. The browser hands it to whatever address is written inside the form. On a site built as a set of finished pages, that address belongs to an outside company. That company stores the lead and sends you a copy.
What the Send button actually does
Every form on a web page carries an address inside it. Mozilla’s developer documentation covers this in its page on sending and retrieving form data, last modified November 9, 2025. The action attribute, it says, “defines where the data gets sent.” If nobody set one, “the data will be sent to the URL of the page containing the form.”
You can check yours in about a minute. Open your contact page on a computer, view the page source, and search the text for the word form. Read the action value next to it. That domain name is the company holding your leads right now. If you do not recognize it, you have learned something worth knowing.
The same page covers how the data travels. With the GET method, “the data sent to the server is appended to the URL.” With POST, “the data is appended to the body of the HTTP request.” A contact form should be using POST. If yours says get, every caller’s name and phone number is being written into a web address.
Why your site hands the lead to somebody else
A fast site is a stack of finished pages. Nothing runs while the visitor waits, which is the point, and it is also why the page itself cannot keep a word of what somebody typed. That whole trade is covered in what a static site cannot do.
So the form has to post somewhere else. Netlify is one of the services that catches it, and its own documentation spells out what happens next. Netlify’s forms setup page, last updated July 14, 2025, says its build system “finds your forms by parsing the HTML of your site when the build completes.” It then strips the marker attribute off your form tag and adds a hidden field naming the form, so submissions arrive tagged.
From there the trail is short. Netlify’s page on form submissions, last updated December 17, 2025, says the data is “securely stored in our user database.” You read the submissions in your site’s Forms tab, and a Download as CSV button sits near the top of each form’s own page. That dashboard is the real filing cabinet.
The email you get is a copy, not the record
Netlify’s form notifications page, last updated July 14, 2025, says you can “send form notifications to email, webhooks, or a Slack workspace.” Pick email and a message shows up when a lead comes in, unless it lands in junk.
That message is a copy. The lead itself sits in the account at the form company. Two things follow from that. Delete the email and the record is still there. Lose access to the account and the emails in your inbox are all you have left.
How long the record lasts depends on the plan. Formspree’s account limits page, updated December 22, 2025, says that on the Free plan you can “store 30 days of submission history.” Basin’s pricing page lists 30-day data retention on its free plan. That page carries no update date. Past that window, whatever landed in your email is the archive.
What the free tier caps at
Free form handling has a ceiling, and it is lower than it sounds.
- Formspree’s account limits page, updated December 22, 2025, says allowances start “at 50 per month on the Free tier.” Every plan there includes unlimited forms, and the Free plan links up to two email addresses for notifications.
- Basin’s pricing page lists 50 submissions a month, one form endpoint, and 30-day data retention on its free plan. That page carries no update date.
- Netlify’s legacy pricing plans page, last updated January 10, 2026, lists 100 form submissions per site per month on the Free and Starter legacy plans.
Fifty a month is fewer than two a day. One storm week, one hot spell, one round of ads that works, and a busy trade can walk through that in two weeks.
What happens at the ceiling depends on the company. Netlify’s billing FAQ for legacy plans, last updated December 16, 2025, walks through an example where a site sits on “Forms Level 0, which includes 100 form submissions per month and 10 MB of uploaded files per month,” then passes 100 and moves up a level, with the payment method not charged until the end of the billing cycle. Formspree’s page says it sends a notice at 50%, 75% and 90% of the monthly limit, and again once the limit is exceeded.
Here is the limit of what any of that tells you. Netlify’s forms usage and billing page, last updated April 14, 2026, says forms are free and unlimited on its newer credit-based plans, and metered per site on the legacy ones. So the 100 figure is true for some accounts and wrong for others. Vendors move these numbers and trim these tiers. The count to trust is the one on your own billing screen today, not the one in an article.
And if you get three form leads a month, none of these ceilings will ever touch you. Paying to raise a limit you never reach is money gone. Read your own count before anyone sells you a tier.
Whose account is holding your customers
Whatever service handles your form is also sitting on names, addresses and phone numbers. Netlify’s submissions page puts it plainly: if your form collects personally identifiable information, “we recommend that you actively manage the data by exporting form submissions and deleting them regularly.”
Rules on holding customer data differ by state and change over time. This is not legal or tax advice. Ask your own attorney what applies in your state before years of customer details pile up in an account nobody opens.
Then settle whose name is on that account. Every static site hands its form off to someone, whoever built it, and the websites Galloping builds are no different. The account should be in the owner’s name, with the owner’s email on it. Ask any builder quoting you the same question, and ask it before you sign.
What to do next
Five steps, in order, and none of them cost anything.
- View the source of your contact page and write down the address in the form’s action value.
- Log into that account. Find where submissions are listed. Read the monthly cap and the retention window on the plan you are actually on, not the plan you were sold.
- Send one test through the live form on your own site. Then look for it in both places, the dashboard and your inbox.
- Export what is stored to a CSV file today and put it somewhere you control.
- Ask whoever built the site whose name the account is in, and get the login.
Once you know the answer, one thing follows. That outside service is now a second piece of machinery that has to stay up for a lead to reach you, and the numbers those companies publish about staying up are worth reading properly. What a 99.9% uptime number is worth breaks that down. What each monthly plan covers is listed on pricing.