Basin Alternative: ShipMyForm vs Basin (2026)

You have a static site on Netlify, Vercel, or GitHub Pages, a contact form that needs somewhere to post, and you have landed on Basin as a solid, grown-up option. Fair choice. Basin is a mature form backend with clear plans and some genuinely useful features on its paid tiers. Before you commit, though, it is worth lining it up against ShipMyForm so you know exactly where each one fits.

Full disclosure: this is published by ShipMyForm, so we will tell you plainly where Basin is the better call and where we think we win. The short version is that both are endpoint-based form backends that work anywhere, so the real question comes down to free-tier headroom, what a paid plan costs at your volume, and the specific feature mix you need.

What Basin does well

Let us start with credit where it is due, because Basin earns it.

Basin has a clear, well-defined tier ladder. You can look at the pricing page and know precisely what you get at each step: Free, Starter, Growth, Pro, and Agency, each with a stated submission cap, form count, and storage allowance. There is no guessing.

Its paid plans are generous on file storage. The Starter tier includes 500 MB, and storage climbs steadily from there: 2 GB on Growth, 10 GB on Pro, and 50 GB on Agency. If your forms collect attachments and you want room to keep them, Basin gives you a lot of headroom without an add-on.

Basin also ships some serious deliverability and safety features on higher tiers. Pro adds virus scanning and custom SMTP, so you can send notification mail through your own provider and scan uploaded files before they reach your inbox. Email and phone validation show up as early as Starter. These are the kinds of features you notice when you are running forms at scale, and they are worth acknowledging.

And Basin is simply a mature product. It has been doing this for years, it works on any host, and it is a safe, predictable pick. None of what follows is an argument that Basin is bad. It is an argument about where the lines are.

The comparison, free tier against free tier

Because most people start on the free plan and only pay once a project proves itself, the free tier is where the day-one difference actually lives. Here is how the two line up.

Neither one asks for a card to start, and both are true endpoint form backends that run on Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, or an S3 bucket. That part is a genuine tie. The difference is in the headroom.

The honest contrast

On the free tier, ShipMyForm is the more generous of the two, and it is not especially close on the numbers that matter early on. You get twice the submissions (100 versus 50), five times the forms (5 versus 1), and six times the retention (180 days versus 30). If you run more than one form, that single-form cap on Basin free is the constraint you hit first, and a 30-day retention window means older submissions age out faster than many people expect.

Spam is the other free-tier gap. ShipMyForm runs full spam protection with no CAPTCHA: a honeypot field, rate limiting, request heuristics, and cross-form velocity checks that catch bots hammering several of your forms at once. Basin free includes basic spam protection, with its more advanced filtering reserved for higher tiers. Nobody has to solve a puzzle on either, which is the right call, but the free-tier depth differs.

Once you are paying

Both products now have public prices, so this is a straight comparison. ShipMyForm's Starter is 6 dollars a month (5 billed yearly) for 2,000 submissions with unlimited forms, 365-day retention, all 20-plus connectors, file uploads (10 MB per file, up to 5 files, 2 GB total), an API, and the ability to remove the badge. Pro is 19 dollars a month (15 billed yearly) for 20,000 submissions with unlimited retention, an auto-responder, a custom domain, and larger uploads (25 MB per file, up to 10 files, 25 GB total).

Basin's ladder is priced per step: Starter around 12.50 dollars a month billed yearly for 250 submissions across 3 forms, Growth around 24.17 for 1,000 submissions, Pro around 30.62 for 5,000, and Agency around 81.25 for 25,000.

On price per submission we are now the cheaper option at every step, and it is not close. What that table does not show is the reason to pay Basin anyway: its paid feature mix is deeper in specific places. Virus scanning on uploads, custom SMTP so notifications leave your own server, real-time email and phone validation that rejects fake leads at the door, and a file-storage ceiling that climbs to 50 GB against our 25. If any of those is the feature you are buying, price is the wrong axis to decide on.

Migrating is a one-line change

Because a form backend is just a URL your form posts to, switching from Basin to ShipMyForm mostly means editing one attribute:

<!-- before -->
<form action="https://usebasin.com/f/xxxxxxxxxxxx" method="POST">

<!-- after -->
<form action="https://shipmyform.com/f/YOUR_FORM_ID" method="POST">

Keep your field name attributes the same and the rest of the form keeps working. ShipMyForm also understands Formspree-compatible reserved fields, so _redirect, _subject, and _gotcha behave the way you would expect. Point the new form at a test submission, confirm it lands in your inbox and your stored inbox, then deploy. There is no data model to rewrite and no lock-in either direction.

Who should pick which

Pick Basin if you want its specific paid features. Virus scanning and custom SMTP on Pro, tiered file storage that scales to 50 GB, and email plus phone validation are all real reasons to choose it, and a decade of operating history is worth something on its own. If your forms are attachment-heavy or you need to route notifications through your own SMTP, Basin has you covered.

Pick ShipMyForm if you want the most generous free tier and the simplest possible static-site setup. You get 250 submissions a month across up to 5 forms with 180-day retention, full spam protection without a CAPTCHA, Email and Webhook connectors, CSV export, a stored inbox, and magic-link or passkey sign-in, all with no credit card. Set up is one line of HTML: point your form's action at the endpoint and you are live.

Both are honest choices. The deciding factor is whether you need Basin's particular paid features, or whether the bigger free tier, the lower paid prices, and the one-line setup matter more for where your project is right now.

Next steps

• New to this? What is a form backend?
• See the setup and reserved fields in the docs.
• Start free: 250 submissions a month across 5 forms, no credit card required.