What happens after form submission limit is hit?

Hello, I’m developing my personal website in Hugo (it can be checked out at: https://hrishikeshk.netlify.app). I was trying to add a contact form which I’d submit using AJAX (in vanilla JS). I was wondering, since Netlify free plan has a 100 submission/month limit, what happens after the limit is hit? Does the form not get submitted and return an error? I understand that I’d get e-mail notification that I’ve reached the limit, but, my website’s visitor won’t know that. And even though I am not expecting to hit those limits anytime soon, I would like my website to be prepared to handle such a situation.

I have set up Success and Error toasts that would be displayed to the user. It’s working fine as of now, I’m getting Success toasts in my tests and getting Error toasts if I disconnect from the internet and try to submit. That’s all good. But, I want to know, how I can handle the condition where I have used up monthly submission limits.

This is the code I’m using currently:

var form = document.querySelectorAll('.contact-form')[0];
form.addEventListener('submit', function (e)
  {
    e.preventDefault();
    var XHR = new XMLHttpRequest();
    var FD = new FormData(form);
    XHR.addEventListener('load', function(event)
      {
        var successToast = new mdc.snackbar.MDCSnackbar(document.querySelector('.success'));
        successToast.open();
      })
    XHR.addEventListener('error', function(event)
      {
        var errorToast = new mdc.snackbar.MDCSnackbar(document.querySelector('.error'));
        errorToast.open();
      })
    XHR.open('POST', '#')
    XHR.send(FD)
  })

Considering the error event is working when the form submission fails (like when the user is disconnected), will this also be sufficient to handle the submission limit hit case?

hi there, here is an answer to the first part of your question, i am going to let somene else weigh in on the second part:

That link had another discussion in it which gave me some scary responses. Apparently, the answer here Over 100 Form submissions on free tier? mentions that Netlify won’t throw any error, rather deactivate my account if my limit is reached and I don’t add a card within a grace period. Probably not a risk I’m willing to take. I’d just use a different service to receive form submissions.

Thanks for pointing to the link.

EDIT: If Netify takes feedback from the forum, it would be a nice feature if Netlify will reject the AJAX request or something, so, at least we can show an error on the website.

We won’t deactivate your account unless you fail to pay your bill. So as long as you pay for the services you use, our service will never lose or hide data.

I understand that you’d rather lose data than pay, but that isn’t the service we’re trying to provide - we keep your site up at all costs, until you don’t pay the costs of hosting. That matches more folks’ business needs than “silently (or loudly) discard data”, so it’s what we’ve implemented.

Since we don’t “mess with” your javascript, you’d have to build in the fallback if the submission is rejected, but you absolutely could do that if you want to :slight_smile:

I wish I could pay. I love Netlify and won’t mind paying the required amounts. But, I’m just a hobbyist while being a student. My parents are fine with me developing skills as long they don’t have to pay.

Again, it’s not like I’d reach 100 submission / month limit as I might not even get that number of visitors, so, the number of people that’d actually fill the form is even less or probably even 0. But, I just didn’t want the risk.

Thanks you for the information though. Netlify is amazing as a service and I’d definitely consider paying for it once I can.

Makes sense! I guess you have a few options:

  1. You could keep a close eye on your usage and disable the form (deploy without it + remove the form from our system as described in this article when we notify you that your usage has grown near the free limit (which is applied per site, monthly, just FYI).
  2. You could choose not to use our forms service. You may be able to find other services that have a free tier with a spending cap; ones like formspree.io work well with Netlify.

On that note, the bandwidth limitation is a harder one - you can’t really “choose not to use it” - but the allowance there is pretty generous for hobbyists and we do warn you as your usage approaches paid levels (we email you at 50% and 80% of the free allocation to warn you about the approaching limit).

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Yeah, I’m aware of bandwidth limitations and they seem to be a lot at my current usage level. Thanks for the info.