I don’t know if anyone looks at this thread anymore or if it even matters, but I talked myself into giving my two cents.
When I found Webflow, I was ecstatic. I’ve been building websites since 1996, and in that time I’ve used everything from PHP Nuke, Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Homesite 5, Yahoo! Sitebuilder, Dreamweaver, Muse, Macromedia’s earlier versions of Flash, custom coding, and 900 other tools. It has always been about finding the most efficient path to making a website and still keeping within QA.
Webflow is the one solution that was superb on all accounts.
So, my team builds site after site, and one day we get a stupid notification that all the forms won’t work anymore. I didn’t catch the e-mail, and sometime later, we got notified we were being sued by a client that we manage on AdWords. They spend around $750/day on AdWords - so imagine how upset they were when form submissions stopped coming in. (All of this was going on when we were moving into a new office.)
They talked to someone on my team, and nobody could figure out why the forms weren’t working. Nobody thought - of all things - that Webflow just killed them. So then we have a meeting and decide that we need to move from Webflow ASAP because we cannot have a system that is dependent on compulsory behavior from a third party. Furthermore, there is absolutely no way that we’re going to be dictated to on which hosting provider we should be using.
Initially we thought of just changing the action on the forms to a custom script, but we were worried what other items on the website might become broken in the future due to unforeseen changes at Webflow. So, we decided to fix the forms with a forward plan to rebuild each website from scratch.
Luckily, I was able to pacify the client in question and were also fortunate that the majority of websites we built on Webflow were for clients with little traffic and not realizing their form was broken. However, for the clients that pay us for online marketing – it was a potential disaster. We are a Google Partner and strongly believe in integrity and delivering for our clients. How can we do that when something so simple as a contact form gets held for hostage in demand for a hosting fee?
Needless to say, I cancelled our Team plan and we’ve been using Dreamweaver for all forward projects.
I would love to come back to Webflow. I was part of the beta programs, have been very vocal in supporting you guys, and I really felt like we were given the shaft. Some of you might say that we could have used our own script to begin with – but that is not a logical suggestion. Webflow portrayed itself as an “all in one solution” that included sending forms. That made the job easier and more efficient and was in fact a selling point on why we signed up.
And I would be open to coming back to Webflow, but under no circumstances would I be okay with paying you guys for hosting at the pricing scheme you have. We have invested heavily in our own servers and that is part of our business model.
It seems almost completely mind-blowing that the team at Webflow would be oblivious to the fact that web designers make residual income off of hosting. Worse even, it opens the door to inefficiency and makes everything convoluted. What if the customer already has hosting? Do we use Dreamweaver for them or Wordpress and Webflow for everyone else? Half of our clients already have hosting and just want a redesign done. Even if a better pricing scheme for hosting was implemented for bigger companies – that still leaves the fact that we have to use our own server for some websites, and Webflow for others.
Lastly, another thing that bugs me is that above, someone is mentioning that Webflow didn’t do this for profit. That it was done to stop spam. Specifically: To stop people from downloading a contact page and submitting a form constantly. I don’t buy this. By putting in the domain for the site settings, it would be exceptionally easy for you guys to have a PHP script that checks the current domain – or to create a config file that stores the site directory in it – to check where the form is located.
Anyway, I’m not writing this to be critical or to be a jerk. I love Webflow and do want to be able to use it again for my company someday. My hope is that all of the feedback has made you guys reevaluate the path you were on and where you’ll head into the future. As I said, this is my two cents.