Most form plugins want you to build the form in their builder. I stopped wanting that the day I started asking an AI for the markup. What comes back is an ordinary <form> tag and it is already fine. The only thing missing is somewhere for it to post.
So that is all FormCatch is. You set the form’s action to an endpoint, and it saves the submission, screens the spam, sends the email and fires the webhook. No shortcode, no block, no list of fields to declare first. It keeps whatever you send it, so you can add a field to the form and nothing behind it needs updating.
The REST API came out of the same thinking. Ask it for /forms/schema and it tells you exactly what a form config looks like, so an assistant can write one without me having written docs for it. Send it something invalid and you get back a 422 naming the field, which means it can fix itself instead of shipping you a broken form.
All of it is free and open source. There is no pro version and no licence key.
What it does
Paste and go
Any HTML form can post to it. No shortcode, no block, no builder, and no fields to set up in advance.
Spam handling
A honeypot is built in. Add Turnstile, hCaptcha or reCAPTCHA if you want one, plus disposable-email blocking and rate limits per IP and per form.
An API that explains itself
Full CRUD over forms and settings with Application Passwords, a schema endpoint, and JSON import and export so forms can live in version control.
Emails with templating
As many email rules per form as you need,
{{placeholder}}substitution, one-line autoresponders, and your own From name and Reply-To.Signed webhooks
Send submissions to Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n or your own API. Every request is HMAC-signed, and file uploads go out behind links that expire.
Your data stays put
Submissions sit in your own database. Search them in the admin, export to CSV, and set how long they are kept.
Open source, all of it
Every feature is in the free plugin. No pro build, no licence key, and no upgrade banner in the admin.