I used to have my static website on Netlify. I was using their form submission API and webhooks to trigger AWS lambda functions to run some scripts and send emails to users upon replying their comments. The website would then be rebuilt using new comments.

I replaced all this crazy setup with vanilla tools. I moved my webpage (a bunch of html pages and other files) to my VPS. I modified nginx to submit incoming html form submissions to my CGI bash script which then in turn adds them to a sqlite database and emails me.

There is no automatic rebuild. I wrote makefiles to rebuild and publish my pages in a few seconds.

It turns out I didn't need anything else, and above all I didn't need to spend time learning someone else's APIs.