Palform

Palform is a form builder whose entire codebase is public, marketing pages included, and whose responses are encrypted end to end. It keeps third-party scripts to a minimum and is free to use on the team's European servers, and the repository holds everything needed to operate the service.

Several Rust and JavaScript components make up the system. Rocket and SeaORM run the backend, Svelte runs the main app, and shared crates compile to WebAssembly for the frontend. The team chose Rust for stability rather than ease of feature work, and reports memory and CPU use close to nothing in practice.

The design choices worth knowing about are structural.

• Typed identifiers: database IDs are custom TSIDs with a per-resource prefix mapped to a Rust type, so passing the wrong kind of ID is caught in code.
• Generated bindings: TypeScript clients for the API come out of an OpenAPI generation step rather than being written by hand.
• WebAssembly modules: encryption and bulk analytics compile with wasm-pack because they run far faster than the JavaScript equivalents.
• PGP encryption: Sequoia handles form encryption and key management on both the backend and the frontend.
• Content sites: Astro and Svelte build the landing page while Docusaurus serves the blog and documentation.

Self-hosting is possible but not officially supported: there are no versioned releases yet, so the main branch carries no stability promise and no setup documentation. Contributions transfer copyright to the company behind the project, and the source is AGPL licensed.