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That's the cold start. Two cheap options:
- A free uptime monitor (Better Stack, UptimeRobot) pinging your URL every 5 minutes keeps it awake for free.
- Move the form to a static host (Vercel, Netlify) and only call Replit for the submit. Static pages never sleep.
For a donation form I'd do 2: the page must be instant, the backend can take a second.