Attractive form web app that allows for file uploads by users?

January 26, 2020 8:35 PM

I am looking to make a website for a research project that would have something like a simple landing page, contact page, and a page that is essentially a form for uploading a file among with some other optional fields that the study participant can fill out. I have coding experience but no relevant experience with contemporary web development stuff, so building something from scratch is out of the picture. Something like Typeform might be perfect, but they only allow 10MB file uploads, even when the uploads go to your personal Dropbox. Darn. The files my study participants are uploading will be around 20-25MB each.

Study participants won't need to manage their files in any way; they just need a place to upload them. So I don't think I need account functionality or anything resembling it. Ideally the files would just get sent to some cloud service (I'm open to opening a Dropbox or Google Drive account, etc., solely for this project) so that they can be deleted off the participant's machine. The most monthly submissions I can imagine would be under 100.


Most web form services (Formstack, Jotform, etc.) just don't look that nice. I really like the look of Typeform, but the file size limitation is a truly annoying deal-breaker. It seems like Squarespace doesn't have native file-uploading abilities, and the after-market, hard-coded solutions I've seen don't look all that nice. Webflow looks nice but way overpowered, with a high learning curve (I don't want to worry about div formatting). Does anyone have any suggestions?

Out of all the questions I've asked here, this one seems to be the most likely to require back-and-forth on my part, but hopefully I've given enough information to make that a little less likely.

posted by baptismal to Technology (4 answers total)

Google Forms will do this, but there's a max overall limit to how much a single form can accept, so it sounds like with your volume you'd need to set up a new one each month.
posted by phunniemee at 4:04 AM on January 27, 2020

I am looking to make a website for a research project that would have something like a simple landing page, contact page, and a page that is essentially a form for uploading a file among with some other optional fields that the study participant can fill out.

Use Wordpress for the site, and get the GravityForms plugin for your form handling.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:48 AM on January 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I’ve used wufoo forms and they work pretty good. You can make them look nice too, but that will require some time and possibly some basic html / css skills
posted by lazaruslong at 10:17 AM on January 27, 2020

WordPress + Contact form 7 would cover this.
posted by my-username at 4:42 PM on February 3, 2020