Building SnapIt Forms
· 3 min · snapitforms.com
Live Product: SnapIt Forms - serverless form builder competing with Typeform, JotForm, and Google Forms.
1000Free submissions/mo
<200msAPI response
99.9%Uptime
Infrastructure
Fully serverless on AWS. Lambda handles form submissions and email notifications. DynamoDB stores everything. SES delivers notifications. Stripe manages subscriptions. The entire backend scales from zero to thousands of concurrent submissions automatically.
Backend: Lambda (Node.js) → DynamoDB + SES + Stripe
Frontend: S3 + CloudFront (global CDN)
Auth: Google OAuth + JWT
Secrets: SSM Parameter Store
Cold Start Optimization
The biggest serverless challenge was cold starts. We solved it with connection pooling - reuse the DynamoDB client across invocations instead of creating new connections each time.
// Connection reuse across Lambda invocations
let dbClient;
const getClient = () => {
if (!dbClient) {
dbClient = new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient({
maxRetries: 3
});
}
return dbClient;
};
Key Differentiators
- Developer-first: HTML form + access key = working form
- Generous free tier: 1,000 submissions/month vs competitors' 100-500
- Sub-200ms response times with global CDN
- Zero server management - 100% serverless