Fill out a contact form on a Cantrip site and the owner doesn't have to go looking for it. The moment you hit submit, an email goes out automatically: to whatever address the site owner set as that form's recipient, or to their own account email if they never picked one. The reply-to on that email is set to your address as the submitter, so replying goes straight back to you, not into some no-reply void. It also links directly to that submission inside the owner's dashboard. None of this needs Zapier or any other connection. It's just how the form works.
That dashboard, called Leads, is worth a look on its own. It's searchable, filterable by form and by date, and each submission opens into a detail view that includes something most contact forms don't bother tracking: a path to conversion, meaning which pages that visitor actually looked at before they filled out the form. If three different landing pages all point to the same form, that's how you'd find out which one is doing the actual convincing.
Forms can also take file uploads, not just text: a resume, a photo of a broken fence, a signed PDF, whatever the form is actually asking for. Attach one and it lands in its own private storage, separate from the database record of the submission itself.
Here's the honest gap. Delete a submission, whether from the Leads page or through the API, and the record disappears. The file that came with it doesn't. Deleting the row doesn't reach over and clean up the file in storage. It just orphans it.
That matters in two ordinary situations. Delete old submissions to free up storage space and it won't help. The file's still sitting there taking up room. Delete a submission because someone asked you to remove their information and the record's gone. The file they attached technically isn't, not automatically.
None of this is a reason to skip file uploads on your forms. They're genuinely useful, and everything else about a submission (the automatic email, the searchable Leads page, the conversion path) works exactly the way you'd hope. Just don't assume deleting a submission deletes everything it came with.