Basin vs Formcarry
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedBasin compared with Formcarry
Formcarry is cheaper and simpler: $5 a month billed annually for 500 submissions against Basin's $12.50 for 250, with automatic spam filtering that needs no configuration and permanent storage on every plan. Basin gives you far more control (three CAPTCHA engines, burner-email and country filters, virus scanning, custom SMTP, signed webhooks) and, crucially, a published overage rate where Formcarry publishes nothing. Take Formcarry for a simple low-volume contact form; take Basin when spam, files, or deliverability are actual problems.
Formcarry compared with Basin
Basin is the more featured backend: layered spam filtering with reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, and Turnstile plus burner-email and country filters, file uploads to 50GB with virus scanning, HMAC-signed webhooks, custom SMTP, and a published overage rate of $5.25 per extra thousand submissions. Formcarry is cheaper at the bottom ($5 against $12.50) and simpler, and its spam filtering needs no configuration at all. Take Formcarry for low-volume simplicity; take Basin once volume, file handling, or deliverability control starts to matter.
Choose Basin if
Developers, agencies, and small technical teams running their own forms who need serious spam control, reliable notification delivery, large file handling with virus scanning, and a backend whose behaviour at the volume cap is published rather than guessed at.
Choose Formcarry if
Developers and small technical teams who build their own forms in React, Next.js, Vue, or plain HTML and need submissions received, stored, spam-filtered, and emailed for a few dollars a month, especially on static and Jamstack sites with no backend of their own.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Basin | Formcarry |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $12.50 per month billed yearly (Starter) (free plan available) | $0 (Baby), then $5 per month billed annually (Starter) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium with five self-serve tiers metered on monthly submissions and storage, with published per-thousand overage rather than a hard cap; prices shown are the yearly-billed monthly equivalents. | Freemium with four self-serve tiers metered on monthly submissions, plus separate meters on team members, file storage, and integration calls; annual billing discounts every paid tier. |
| Free plan | Free covers 1 form, 50 submissions a month, 100MB of storage, basic spam protection, Zapier, and AJAX support, with submissions retained for only 30 days. | Baby is free and covers 1 form, 50 submissions a month, 1 team member, file upload, built-in integrations, and white-label handling. |
| Free trial | No separate trial; the free plan is the evaluation path | No separate trial; the free Baby plan is the evaluation path |
| Best for | Developers, agencies, and small technical teams running their own forms who need serious spam control, reliable notification delivery, large file handling with virus scanning, and a backend whose behaviour at the volume cap is published rather than guessed at. | Developers and small technical teams who build their own forms in React, Next.js, Vue, or plain HTML and need submissions received, stored, spam-filtered, and emailed for a few dollars a month, especially on static and Jamstack sites with no backend of their own. |
| Setup time | Ten to fifteen minutes for a working endpoint, plus another half hour if you are configuring the spam stack properly and connecting custom SMTP. | Ten minutes, and that includes reading the documentation. Create a form in the dashboard, copy the endpoint, set it as your action attribute or POST target, and submit a test. |
| Learning curve | Low for the endpoint and moderate for the spam configuration, which has enough options that it rewards a deliberate pass rather than accepting defaults. Form Studio is trivial if you use it. | Minimal for a developer and impossible for anyone else. There is nothing to learn beyond an HTTP POST, but you must be able to write and deploy the form yourself. |
| Platforms | HTTP POST endpoint usable from any framework, Plain HTML forms, BasinJS for JavaScript frameworks, Form Studio drag-and-drop builder, Static sites and single-page applications via AJAX | HTTP POST endpoint usable from any framework, Plain HTML forms, React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Astro, and other JavaScript frameworks, Static site generators, Mobile applications |
| Compliance | GDPR tooling including automatic data receipts and easy deletion, Configurable data retention, Cloudflare DDoS protection and WAF integration, No published HIPAA business associate agreement, No published accessibility conformance statement | GDPR compliant with Data Processing Agreements available, CCPA compliant, Standard Contractual Clauses available, No published HIPAA business associate agreement |
| Founded | 2017 | 2017 |
| Headquarters | British Columbia, Canada | Not publicly disclosed |
| Ownership | Owned by Moonshot Ventures, Inc. | Independently owned; no funding disclosed |
Strengths and limitations
Basin
Strengths
- The deepest spam stack in this part of the category: three CAPTCHA engines plus duplicate, country, language, burner-email, honeypot, domain, and WAF filtering, with advanced filtering on Pro.
- A published overage rate of $5.25 per thousand submissions, roughly half a cent each, with the form continuing to work rather than pausing.
- File uploads to 50GB with virus scanning and signed URLs, which is far beyond what any hosted form builder will accept.
- HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with event logs, so receiving endpoints can verify authenticity and failures are debuggable.
Limitations
- The free plan drops submissions after thirty days, which is a quiet way to lose data if nobody reads the retention line.
- Starter at $12.50 includes zero collaborators and one project, so it is genuinely single-developer and most teams have to start at Growth.
- Submission allowances are low relative to price at the bottom: 250 a month on Starter against Formcarry's 500 for $5.
- No HIPAA business associate agreement and no published data residency region, which matters for healthcare and for EU-only requirements where Forminit states AWS Ireland.
Formcarry
Strengths
- Spam filtering that works with no configuration at all and no CAPTCHA in front of your users, which is the main reason to rent a backend rather than write one.
- The cheapest credible paid plan in this category at $5 a month billed annually, with unlimited forms included from that tier.
- Submissions are stored permanently rather than expiring on a retention clock, which several competitors cannot say about their lower tiers.
- Team members are bundled generously (three on the $5 plan, five on the $15 plan) rather than sold per seat.
Limitations
- No published overage rate, so what happens when you exceed the monthly submission cap is undocumented; assume the cap is firm and plan for it.
- The jump from Basic at 2,000 submissions to Premium at 30,000 has nothing in between, making mid-volume forms disproportionately expensive.
- Integration calls are metered separately and set equal to the submission allowance on Starter, so any form firing more than one integration per submission runs out early.
- No form builder, no hosted form page, and no conditional logic; if you cannot write the markup yourself this product does nothing for you.
Pricing compared
Basin
Freemium with five self-serve tiers metered on monthly submissions and storage, with published per-thousand overage rather than a hard cap; prices shown are the yearly-billed monthly equivalents.
- Free$0
- Starter$12.50
- Growth$24.17
- Pro$30.62
- Agency$81.25
At 500 submissions a month the cheapest route is Starter at $12.50 plus roughly $1.31 of overage, or Growth at $24.17 if you want retention and collaborators, which most people will. At 5,000 a month Pro costs $30.62 billed yearly, or about $367 a year, against Formcarry's $960 and Forminit's $228. That places Basin in the middle on headline price and comfortably first on what you get for it: three CAPTCHA engines, seven or eight spam filters, virus scanning, 50GB uploads, signed webhooks, custom SMTP, and an overage rate that keeps the form alive. If you are choosing a backend on capability per dollar rather than on the cheapest possible line item, Basin is the pick.
Formcarry
Freemium with four self-serve tiers metered on monthly submissions, plus separate meters on team members, file storage, and integration calls; annual billing discounts every paid tier.
- Baby$0
- Starter$5
- Basic$15
- Premium$80
- EnterpriseCustom quote
At 500 submissions a month Formcarry costs $60 a year, which is the cheapest way to receive form data from a service that will still exist next year. At 5,000 a month the picture inverts completely: you are past Basic's 2,000 and into Premium at $960 a year, where Basin's Pro plan handles 5,000 for around $367 and Forminit's Pro handles 5,000 for $228. The verdict is therefore volume-dependent in an unusually sharp way. Under two thousand submissions a month Formcarry is excellent value and the unconfigured spam filtering is worth the money on its own. Over two thousand it becomes the most expensive of the three backends by a wide margin, and you should price the alternatives before renewing.
Editorial verdict on each
Basin
Basin is the most serious form backend a small company can buy, and the reason is that it treats the two things that actually break in production, spam and email delivery, as product areas rather than checkboxes. Three CAPTCHA engines, seven or eight independent filters, virus scanning, 50GB uploads, HMAC-signed webhooks, custom SMTP, and data receipt emails in fifteen languages is a genuinely deep stack for around $30 a month. Above all it publishes its overage rate at roughly half a cent a submission and keeps the form working, which is the single most important thing a backend can promise. Buy it if you run forms across many sites, if spam or attachments are real problems, or if you want the failure mode written down. Do not buy the free plan expecting to keep your data, since it is dropped after thirty days, and do not buy Basin at all if you need someone else to build the form.
Read the full Basin profileFormcarry
Formcarry is the cheapest sensible way for a developer to stop writing form backends, and at $5 a month billed annually for unlimited forms and 500 submissions it is close to unbeatable at the bottom of the market. The zero-configuration spam filtering is the real product, and it means no CAPTCHA in front of your users and no reCAPTCHA keys to rotate. Buy it for Jamstack client sites, marketing pages attached to no backend, and any React form where you want the markup to stay yours. Two things should stop you: the undocumented behaviour at the submission cap, which is the one place a form backend must not be vague, and the cliff between the 2,000-submission plan at $15 and the 30,000-submission plan at $80, which makes anything mid-volume the worst deal of the three backends here. Under two thousand a month, buy it without much thought. Over that, price Basin and Forminit first.
Read the full Formcarry profileBasin profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Formcarry last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.