Event registration: the form is the easy half

Last updated 17 September 2026

Anyone can put a registration form on the internet in ten minutes. What goes wrong is everything that happens after the first twenty people reply.

The form collects answers. It does not tell you that Sarah booked twice, that four people cancelled last night, that eleven of your sixty need a vegetarian meal, or who has not been sent joining instructions. Those questions are about the list, and in most setups the list is a spreadsheet somebody exports on the morning of the event.

What an event sign-up actually needs

• A public form anyone can fill in without an account, on a phone, at a venue with bad signal.
• One list of who is coming that updates itself as replies arrive, rather than an export that is stale the moment it is made.
• A way to see the awkward slices: cancellations, dietary requirements, people who registered twice, who has paid if you are charging.
• Something that tells you when a session is full or when the numbers move, without you remembering to look.
• A door list on the day that somebody can tick through, on a phone, at a table by the entrance.

A free way to run one

Bionic Forms is not a form builder — it is a small database that happens to have forms on the front. That distinction is the whole point here: the registration form and the list of attendees are the same thing, so there is nothing to export and nothing to keep in step.

What that gives you, concretely:

• A public page at /f/your-event that anyone can fill in with no account. It is rendered on the server, so it works with JavaScript switched off and on a bad connection, and it comes with a QR code — which is what you actually want on a poster or a table card.
• One poster, one event. When you make the link you pick which event it is for, and every reply through it is filed against that event. The person filling it in is never asked and never sees it, so two posters for two evenings do not end up in one pile somebody has to sort out afterwards.
• An anonymous mode that stores no IP address anywhere: not on the record, not in the logs, and not in the rate limiter, which hashes instead. Most tools promise anonymity and keep the address.
• Every reply lands as a record in a list you can filter, group and sort — so “who cancelled” and “who needs a vegetarian meal” are screens rather than spreadsheet formulas.
• Automations written as a sentence: “every Monday at 8am, email me everyone who registered in the last week”. You type that; the app builds it and reads it back to you in plain words before it runs.
• Every change is kept, so a cancellation that was really a mistake can be looked up rather than argued about.

There is one already built

Open the event sign-ups app — it lands in your own free account with the four screens above already made: who is coming, who needs a different meal, who cancelled, and the events themselves. It is one of the ready-made apps. No card, no trial clock.

On the day there is a tick box beside every name. One person at a table by the entrance, with a phone, taps people off as they arrive — which is the part a spreadsheet on a laptop in a back room cannot do.

If it is not quite your event, open the live demo database with no account and no email, or describe what you need in a sentence and have it built from that description.

We also do not take payments. If your event is ticketed and money changes hands at the point of registration, you want a ticketing product for that part; this is for the list of who is coming and everything you need to know about them.

This URL used to hold a form template from the old Bionic Forms, which was a form builder and was retired on 11 July 2026. The page you are reading replaced it because the question people arrive with — how do I run an event sign-up — still has a good answer here, and a notice saying the product changed was not it.