Building a contact form in Next.js is straightforward.

You create a form component, add your input fields, wire up some state with useState, and handle the submission with a fetch call. Clean. Predictable. Very Next.js.

But then comes the question every Next.js developer eventually faces:

Where does the data actually go?

The obvious answer is an API route. You create a pages/api/contact.ts file or an app/api/contact/route.ts file, write a handler that receives the submission, and then figure out how to store it somewhere. A database. A Google Sheet. An email. Something.

For a side project or a client site, that is a lot of infrastructure to set up and maintain just to collect a few contact form submissions. You need a database or a third-party email service. You need environment variables.…