Claiming a form

Claiming is how an unclaimed form becomes a real, owned form in a dashboard. Everything it collected while unclaimed comes with it.

Who can claim

Possession of the claim link is the authorization. Whoever opens it and signs in becomes the owner. The account they sign in with does not need to match any of the form's recipients, which is deliberate: it lets you provision a form for a colleague and hand them the link.

The claim link

The link points at the frontend, not the API:

text

https://lanes.sh/claim/{token}

You get it in one of two ways, depending on how the form was provisioned:

If the form had recipients, a claim email is sent to the first one.
If it did not, provisioning returns a single-use claim_url for you to deliver yourself.

Preview before claiming

GET /v1/claim/{token}/preview is a public, non-consuming peek. It never burns the single-use token, so an email scanner prefetching the link cannot spend it. It returns enough to render a claim page:

json

{
  "status": "claimable",
  "frozen": false,
  "form_name": "Contact form",
  "claim_email_masked": "o***@acme.com",
  "submissions_waiting": 3,
  "token_expires_at": "2026-07-20T09:00:00Z"
}

status is one of claimable, already_claimed, deleted, or invalid_or_expired.

Redeeming

POST /v1/claim/{token} is the actual redeem. It is authenticated: the caller signs in (Firebase) and the token is consumed for that account. The redeem is race-safe and single-use, so only one caller can ever win a given token.

This runs in the browser

Claiming happens on the site, not through raw API calls you script. Send the owner to the claim link and let them sign in. There is no way to claim a form on another person's behalf through the API.

What claiming changes

A successful claim does all of this in one transaction:

The claimer's default workspace and project are created if they do not have one yet.
The form moves to claimed: claimed_at is stamped, it is filed under the workspace's project, and if it was frozen it is restored.
Every held submission is released, spam included, and becomes visible in the dashboard.
If the form had recipients, the first one is pre-verified in the new workspace, which turns email forwarding on.

No recipients means no forwarding yet

A form claimed with no recipients has nothing to verify, so forwarding stays off until the owner adds and verifies one in the dashboard. See Integrating a form for how delivery works.

After claiming

The form now lives in the dashboard. From there the owner can manage recipients, origins, schema, and delivery, and can create API keys to manage or submit to it programmatically.

Next: Submitting data.