Formblade Review (2026): A Fast, Privacy-First Form Builder for Cannabis Brands

In March 2026 we moved a cannabis news site off WordPress onto static hosting. Pages got faster, the hosting bill dropped to near zero, and everyone was happy until a reader emailed to ask why nobody had answered the contact form in two weeks. Every Contact Form 7 form on the site had died the moment PHP went away. No error, no warning. They just swallowed messages and showed a green "thanks" to the sender.

Formblade is what we replaced them with. After running it on a handful of cannabis sites since, it's the form tool I reach for first, and this is the honest version of why.

What Formblade actually is

It's a form backend, not a plugin. Per formblade.com, you point a normal HTML form at https://formblade.com/f/your-id, the submission gets captured on their side, and it lands wherever you tell it to. No database on your end, no PHP, nothing to patch at 2am when a plugin CVE drops. That last part is why it matters for us: a Formblade form is just markup, so it survives a move from WordPress to a static host or a React build without anyone touching it. Their docs list WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify, React, Next.js and plain static HTML, and in practice the same three lines work on all of them.

The thing I didn't expect to like: the same endpoint can take more than one form. We wired a contact form, a wholesale inquiry and a newsletter signup to one project and sort them with a hidden field. No new integration per page.

What you get before paying anything

The free plan covers 300 submissions a month with no card on file (per formblade.com, current as of 2026). For a brand fielding a few contact and wholesale messages a day, that's headroom, not a teaser. What's on that free tier is the part that surprised me:

• Spam handling they call FormShield, which their site rates at 98% of spam and bots blocked, with five captcha options on top (hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA, Turnstile, GeeTest, or a plain math check) if you want them. We left captcha off and still stopped getting junk.
• Seven notification channels, so a submission can hit email, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Viber or Microsoft Teams. Our wholesale inquiries go straight to a Slack channel the sales side actually reads.
• File uploads up to 1 MB and 100 MB of storage on the free tier.
• Fifteen integrations plus a REST API, including Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Mailchimp, Brevo, Zapier, Make and raw webhooks, so a lead can drop into a sheet or a CRM without you writing glue code.

There's also an auto-responder, conditional email routing, a weekly digest, and an AI form builder if you'd rather describe the form than hand-build it. I ignored the AI builder at first (reflex), then used it to spin up a three-field event RSVP in about a minute. Fine, it's good.

How it compares to what cannabis sites usually run

Most weed brands I audit are on one of four things: Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, a Typeform embed, or a Google Form somebody linked in a hurry. Each one breaks in a different way. Contact Form 7 is free but dies the second you leave PHP, which is exactly the trap we hit. Gravity Forms is solid on WordPress and useless off it, and the license runs about $59 a year to start. Typeform looks great and loads heavy, and the free tier caps at 10 responses a month before it pushes you toward plans that start around $25 a month. A Google Form works and looks like a Google Form, which on a brand site is its own problem.

The row that matters for anyone thinking about page speed or a future re-platform is the middle one. A plain-HTML form has no host dependency to break, and it doesn't drag a third-party script onto every page the way an embed does.

Setting it up, start to finish

This is the part people assume is harder than it is. You create a form in the dashboard, copy the endpoint id, and drop a normal form into your page that posts to it:

1. Sign up and create a form. You get an endpoint like /f/ab12cd.
2. Paste a plain HTML form into your page with action="https://formblade.com/f/ab12cd" and method="POST", plus your name, email and message fields.
3. Point the notifications at wherever you work (we send contact to email, wholesale to Slack).
4. Optional but worth it: wire the newsletter form's submissions into Mailchimp or a Google Sheet so the list builds itself.

That's the whole job. The first time I did it, the longest step was deciding which Slack channel got the wholesale pings. No build step, no plugin to keep current, and because it's just markup, your developer can drop the same snippet into a static or React build later without redoing any of it.

Why it fits a cannabis site in particular

Two reasons, and neither is about features. First, speed. An image-heavy cannabis blog lives and dies on page weight, and a form that ships as plain HTML adds essentially nothing to the render. Most form plugins drag in a script bundle and a few network calls before a visitor can type a word. Second, fewer third parties. Payment processors and ad networks are already twitchy about the cannabis vertical, and every external script on a page is one more thing to explain in a review. Formblade keeps the submission on its own domain instead of routing your visitors through an ad-tech middleman, and it ships GDPR and CCPA presets (15 compliance regulations in all, one click each) for the audiences that care, which in this business is most of them.

Where it isn't the right call

It's not a survey platform. If you need branching multi-page logic and built-in payment collection, you're in Typeform or Jotform territory, and Formblade will feel deliberately plain. The free cap is real too: 300 submissions a month is fine for a brand site, but a lead-gen campaign that pulls thousands of entries will push you to a paid tier fast, and the chat-channel limit on the free plan (50 a month) means a high-volume Slack route fills up before the email one does. The 1 MB upload limit also rules it out for anything like lab-result or COA intake where the files are big. None of that is a knock. It's a tool that picked a lane, and most brand sites live well inside it.

One more honest caveat: I haven't run it past a few thousand submissions a month, so I can't speak to how the Pro tier behaves at real volume. Everything here is the free and low-volume experience, which is where most cannabis brand sites actually sit.

The verdict

We still run the contact page here on Formblade, plus the newsletter form, and both came through the WordPress-to-static move that quietly killed Contact Form 7. If you want the longer version of how to actually use these forms to grow a list rather than just collect complaints, I wrote that up in capturing leads on your cannabis site. For a contact form that loads instantly, blocks spam, and won't break the next time you change hosts, it's hard to argue with free.

Sources & Notes

• Formblade product facts (free-tier submission cap, FormShield spam figure, notification channels, integrations, upload and storage limits, compliance presets, chat-channel limit) are from formblade.com, checked 2026.
• Competitor pricing (Gravity Forms ~$59/yr, Typeform free-tier response cap and ~$25/mo entry plan) reflects the vendors' public pricing as of early 2026; check their sites for current numbers.
• The CF7 failure, the multi-form setup, and the spam observations are from our own migration of this site off WordPress in March 2026.

Questions we get about Formblade

Is Formblade really free?

Yes, the free plan runs 300 submissions a month with no credit card, and the spam blocking, integrations and most channels are included. You only pay when volume or advanced limits push you past it.

Will a Formblade form work on a static or non-WordPress site?

That's the main reason to use it. The form is plain HTML posting to a Formblade URL, so it works the same on static HTML, React, Next.js, Webflow, Shopify and WordPress. Nothing server-side on your end has to exist.

How does it stop spam without annoying real visitors?

FormShield plus a honeypot field runs invisibly, and formblade.com rates it at 98% of bots blocked. You can layer a captcha (hCaptcha, Turnstile and three others) if you get targeted, but most small sites won't need to.

Is it better than Contact Form 7?

For a site that might ever leave WordPress, yes, because CF7 stops working the moment there's no PHP. On a WordPress site you're keeping forever, CF7 is fine. We switched because we left WordPress and didn't want to relearn this lesson on the next site.