At Orbital Alchemists, we believe that simple tools built with intentional boundaries are often the most durable. Today we are sharing the first working version of Signalforge, a lightweight, focused project designed to solve a deceptively tricky problem: handling inbound communications (enquiries) cleanly across multiple independent websites. Signalforge is not a sprawling SaaS platform, and it is not trying to be an all-in-one marketing CRM. It is a small, modular inbound pipeline that gives us a unified way to collect contact form submissions, reject automated bot noise, maintain a private audit log, and deliver messages directly to where they belong. Instead of scattering form handlers or relying on opaque third-party form widgets across our ecosystem, every site now routes into a single, predictable channel that we control. ...

I talk a lot about the sovereign web — the idea that the tools running our digital presence should be ones we understand, control, and can move away from if we ever need to. So it’s worth being upfront about a small contradiction I’ve just built into my own stack. Signalforge is my new inbound communication system: a single channel that all of the sites now use for contact forms, spam filtering, and getting messages into my inbox reliably. Before Signalforge, contact forms across the OA websites were scattered, inconsistent, and dependent on whatever third-party form service happened to be bolted on at the time. Signalforge replaces all of that with one purpose-built pipeline that I designed and can own end to end. ...