How to Add a Free Captcha to Any HTML Form Without a Backend
Suppose you have ever woken up to an inbox full of spam from your own contact form; you know how frustrating it is. Random gibberish. Fake email addresses. Crypto scams. All arriving because a bot found your form and started hitting it automatically. The usual advice is to add a captcha. But most captcha tutorials assume you have a backend server to verify the token. If you are running a static site, a Webflow site, a GitHub Pages project, or any HTML form without your own server, you are stuck. This tutorial shows you how to add a working captcha to any HTML form in under 5 minutes. No backend required. No server setup. No PHP. Just a form that blocks bots automatically and turns every real submission into a tracked lead. What You Will Need You need two things: A free Formgrid account at formgrid.dev . Formgrid is an open-source form backend and lead pipeline that handles all the captcha verification on the server side for you. An existing HTML form on your website or a new one you are about to build. That is it. No Cloudflare account. No hCaptcha account. No API keys to manage yourself. Step 1: Sign Up for Formgrid Go to formgrid.dev and click Sign Up Free . No credit card required. Once you are logged in, you will see your dashboard. This is where all your forms and leads live. Step 2: Create a New Form Click Create Form and give your form a name. Something like "Contact Form" or "Quote Request" works fine. You do not need to use the form builder for this tutorial. You already have your own HTML form. You are just using Formgrid as the backend that receives your submissions, verifies the captcha, and tracks your leads. After creating the form, you will be taken to the form details page. Step 3: Copy Your Form Endpoint URL On the form details page you will see your unique endpoint URL. It looks like this: https://formgrid.dev/api/f/your-form-id Copy this URL. You are going to use it as the action attribute of your HTML form. Update your HTML form to point to this