What is Google Apps Script?

Google Apps Script is a cloud-hosted JavaScript runtime that lives inside your Google account and has direct, authenticated access to Google Workspace services like Sheets, Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. You write code in a browser IDE, deploy it as a web app, and Google gives you a public URL that runs your function on demand. There is no server to provision, no billing meter, and no separate authentication layer for your own data - the script already runs as you.

Apps Script is how millions of automations get built without hiring a developer: custom Sheets functions, scheduled triggers, Gmail filters, Docs templates. For SaaS vendors, it is also a way to offer a deep Google integration without ever seeing the user's data.

SheetLink Forms ships a small Apps Script connector (about 80 lines of JavaScript) that you paste into your own Sheet and deploy as a web app. From that moment, WordPress posts form submissions straight to your Apps Script URL, and the script writes rows to your Sheet using the built-in SpreadsheetApp service. Because the script is authenticated as you, no OAuth tokens are stored on your WordPress site and no data ever touches the SheetLink servers - it is the most privacy-preserving architecture you can build for a form-to-Sheets pipe.

Since v1.12.0 this is the classic, self-hosted alternative rather than the default: the recommended method is now one-click Google Sheets connect (a standard Google consent screen plus the Google file picker, with the least-privilege drive.file scope). Both methods are free and fully supported - choose Apps Script when you want zero OAuth and everything running under your own Google account.