Why I built Toimii

A €200 contact form didn't sit right

A while back I was looking at the website of a local electrician — the kind of small, honest business that most of the web is actually made of. Tucked in the corner was a tidy little contact widget. I got curious and looked up the tool behind it. It started at around €200 a month.

Two hundred euros a month, for a small trade business, to collect a handful of messages. My first thought was the developer's reflex: I can build that. The second one is the thought that stuck — and it shouldn't cost anywhere near this much.

Most small websites don't need a database

Here's the thing I keep coming back to. Most small-business websites are a handful of pages — who you are, what you do, how to reach you — and that text changes maybe twice a year. Yet the usual way to build one is a full content system with a database and a server running behind it: something that can be hacked, something that can go down, all to serve words that almost never change.

I've spent years building on static site generators, and for this kind of site they've always felt like exactly the right tool. Static websites are cheap, fast, and almost impossible to knock over — there's no database to break and no server to babysit. You write the pages once and serve plain files.

The one thing a static site can't do on its own is the dynamic part — actually receiving a message, taking a booking, collecting an order. That's the genuinely hard bit, and it's exactly the piece those expensive widgets sell back to you. Closing that gap — cleanly, and for a fair price — is the whole reason Toimii exists.

What Toimii is

Toimii is a small set of tools you drop into any website with one line of code — a contact form, a booking calendar, an order form, feedback, a price calculator. No plugins, no database, no lock-in. It's made in Finland, hosted in the EU, privacy-first, and needs no cookie banner. It works just as happily on a hand-built static site as on WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, or Wix.

It starts at €10 a month. Not €200.

Built with open source

Toimii stands on the shoulders of some wonderful open-source projects. Sincere thanks to the people who build and maintain them.

If you have a question, the contact form on this site comes straight to me — I'd genuinely like to hear from you.

— Janne Warén