I was doing research, and it seems like most document signature companies all charge monthly subscription fees! This does not work for me as I am not using the platform on a monthly basis.
Are there free, open source alternatives to Docusign? If so, why do more companies not use them?
Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose DocuSign anyways.
The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract.
There probably is a “nobody got fired for buying Docusign” effect, but it would be supported by their mindshare, not some special status in courts. The vast, vast majority of Docusigned docs will never end up in a court anyway (most contracts are never litigated).
Docusign is the only current major e-sign platform that works with the federal government (Adobe is applying).
If you have to pick one vendor and there’s even an outside chance you’ll interface with the fed govt, you just choose Docusign.
> A method [...] is used to identify the signer and to indicate the signer’s intention to sign the document;
> The method used is as reliable as appropriate for the purposes of the communication or is proven to identify the person and indicate their intention; and
> The signer consents to the method used, with such consent allowed to be express or inferred from the circumstances.
Guess what? Australian courts apparently accept a name written at the bottom of an email as passing this test as being "as reliable as appropriate" for many situations. The barrier to entry in Australia is essentially zero. Europe has much stricter laws, introduced in the same year, in a two-tier arrangement where the strict version requires something like DocuSign, and moreover that the ability to produce a signature rests in the control of the person it identify, and that person only. (This paper http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf argues for adopting the European approach in Australia.) A sibling comment identifies the US federal government's requirements as being essentially "we must approve individual e-sig services for use with the federal government", which is insane to me but there you go.
> Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage
... but they are attesting that they have read the laws about e-signatures, those claims are affirmed by their continued existence, and that's worth a lot of time otherwise spent second-guessing your chosen platform.
I knew roughly the position in Australia, but wasn't aware of the European requirements -- DocuSign has done a medium amount of work researching and documenting their compliance to give you peace of mind, and quite a lot of work complying with the stricter laws that are out there. There's nothing in that that is particularly difficult to replicate, i.e. there's no secret sauce, it's just a lot of work. The overall product (works for doing business with anyone you need it to) is more than the sum of its parts.
It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tech monsters.
The market loves these types of stories, right up until the growth inevitably declines to/near single digits and then they get a boring eBay valuation (circa ~2003-2019).
The short of it is, a lot of the future returns have been pulled forward.
DocuSign’s feature list is huge. It’s not just overlaying a signature on a doc. It’s a massive and complex app that most people will ignore or trivialize, but that shit just works.
Mark all the signature locations?
Multi-user?
Chained dependencies?
Recording and redownloading later?
SSO
Audit / identification
Salesforce integration?
Contract generation?
Orange site minimizing huge successful company because they care about one feature seems super on brand.
The problem described above also doesn’t exist. A signature isn’t a necessary element of a contract, and even in situations where a signature is statutorily required for a certain type of contract, an e-signature is legally recognised (in all US states at least) without specifying that particular service providers or methodologies have to be used.
https://www.cogencyglobal.com/blog/getting-document-signatur...
I've never actually seen a proper esignature in a court document. Most court record systems are so outdated that it's honestly an enormous win if they allow you to view, upload or download documents over the web at all.
I helped implement a solution during the peak period of pandemic that ended up handling millions of transactions. Probably took 3 days from handshake to live.
As much as vendors like DocuSign provide UX and infrastructure for document management, they also package an aspect of legal compliance as a service.
That's not what they said though, and while this sounds nitpicky it's vital to the point. You can choose between a well known accepted option or something else to save a few bucks. The cost of docusign is, as far as I can tell, low enough that even considering the question for long would easily cost more.
And this is not just about one jurisdiction, but also other ones, where e-signature laws may be different.
IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptance, legally speaking.
DocuSign's use case is not the signing, but the management of those documents and signatures - tracking which documents are sent, which have been read (yes, the doc owner can get notified when you even look at a Docusign document), which have been signed, and being able to store copies of signed docs. It is mostly for the companies sending you contracts, not for you as the signer.
Plus, yeah, you get to see if the other party signed, all the appropriate spots for signing are flagged, the entire audit trail of the document.
It's super convenient.
Also, it's cheap AF. A personal account is like $10-15 and a business account is $25-45. That's pocket change for the service you get.
EDIT: I've worked on document management software. Let me tell you that people will pay bank for document management -- without even the signing part. In any field.
It’d be “cheap” or an acceptable price if a signed document costed $5. Subscriptions are BS for occasional users.
A pay as you go model would qualify as "cheap AF," but the subscription model can be extremely expensive on a per document basis if you need to do a couple a year.
We use DocuSign because FDA requires electronic signatures that follow 21 CFR Part 11. A lot of companies will be very hesitant to roll their own or claim compliance if the supplier (like DocuSign) doesn't claim it's compliant.
The document can be deleted.
But it's not about whether something is legally binding, it's how much deniability you might have in court, and what sort of evidence is admissible in the first place.
These legal hurdles make it easier to establish that someone accepted a contract based on a signature than based on spoken words. That's why a notary public or at least a witness is usually involved when you sign papers involving potentially large liabilities against yourself.
...for some contracts. A large number of jurisdictions require written contracts with signatures for contracts that meet various criteria. These rules are often based on or descended from the Statute of Frauds [1], so that gives a good idea of the general kind of contracts that usually have writing and signature requirements.
Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.
A very few places will reject the Preview-signed copy, wanting a hand signature, but you can filter the pages a bit (tilt slightly, add noise) and they won't know the difference.
Source: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
Someone is going to roll a decentralized ID system on blockchain and tank this whole sector...
Rarely, very very rarely, does the tech being differentiated ever matter. At Docusign’s level, it’s much more about sales and marketing. They’ve been the market leader for years, and even if they slip to 2nd or 3rd place, they’re still a massive multibillion dollar company.
I think engineers and technical people often have a hard time truly grasping how absolutely gigantic certain markets are (I struggled with this for years). Docusign’s market is unimaginably large.
"Weak Competition" or legacy players are largely irrelevant, which is an important distinction to make.
I have no doubt in 10 years there will be numerous ways to sign documents electronically and margins will be thin.
Think about cloud storage and other areas with a high amount of competition. All of these things will trend towards margin compression in the long run, almost by definition of being in a competitive/free market.
Cost of switching matters a lot too. It's easy to move from DocuSign to some competitor. It's more difficult to move from managed MongoDB to managed Postgres, due to having to define some translation layer.
The thing is that we're just early in the digitization cycle so all these first movers becomes pseudo monopolies. That won't last for more than a decade or two.
Highly likely that stock performance for a lot of these 20-100x sales stocks will be very poor over the next 10 years. But you may get a good stretch of high returns in the short/medium term.
Think about when Ford created the assembly line. Did that give them a forever Monopoly on cheap production of cars? There's this attitude that competition doesn't matter in technology, but we can clearly see in things like laptops, routers, hardware etc, that margins became very low after market got saturated.
It's only just the last few years that things like DocuSign were even possible to create.
This is especially true for software where once it's built, marginal cost to deliver value is extremely low. Theoretically, a well designed and cloud native/managed version of DocuSign could be run by just a handful of people in the long run. Do people really expect that nobody will accomplish this in the next 10-20 years?
Where there's margin, there's opportunity.
To cite a single example: corporate procurement systems. It's like trench warfare to get enrolled in many companies, but once completed your sales team can then recite the following incantation: "we're an approved vendor." The effect on sales can be magical. ;)
Disclaimer: I use Docusign and have done so for years. It's transformative in a way that's similar to password managers.
When I hear startups sell on the fact that their solution uses blockchain and is somehow inherently better for it, I turn and walk the other direction. Same for AI/ML, BigData, etc.
blockchain is really hot with VCs these days, so that’s who. why? the rewards for a document signing product are large — as evidenced by new traditional companies entering the space (HelloSign). basing a new competitor in this space off of blockchain offers differentiation. despite being less mature or feature rich, you get prime access to one area of the market that none of your competitors can easily serve. that is, you get your first, profitable, customers way faster and they become a core source of revenue to build out from there.
The main issue is actually not doing it properly, but figuring out a business model that makes that worth doing. It's a key issue with standardizing and decentralizing a lot of things and getting them done. Technically feasibility isn't the issue. But why would you invest in it? It takes effort and where's the profit if you let go of all the control points and let others freely copy the software or implement their own. There's no upside to dedicating your life to that. You see the same issues with federated chat systems; or identity systems; or payment systems. The incumbents have no incentive to fix these things as they make money from the status quo and for outsiders to first fix it and than make no money makes no sense. Occasionally somebody tries of course with varying degrees of success. But it seems hard to convince businesses to switch to relatively unknown OSS stuff.
And of course OSS and industry standards don't just magically happen. Somebody has to pay people to work on OSS. Or at least has to care enough to dedicate non trivial amounts of time and effort to get things going. Mostly this isn't even a technology problem. You actually need lawyers and other skills to do this properly. The tech is mostly pretty trivial. Lots of off the shelf OSS stuff you can repurpose for this. I'm sure that's what Docusign did probably. I bet most of their expenses are sales, legal, and marketing rather than tech.
Edit: see https://www.docusign.com/products/apis
It’s a fundamental principle of common law that agreements are contracts even if you don’t follow some specific procedure (such as pen and paper signatures or Docusign) to agree to them.
In the US, federal law (UCC) deviates from common law jurisprudence by requiring that some contracts be written and signed, but it says that signing is “using any symbol executed or adopted with present intention to adopt or accept a writing” (i.e., anything is a signature if you intend it to be one) and that the symbol may be produced “manually or by means of a device or machine” (e.g. a computer).
In the U.S., Louisiana does not follow common law (they are based on Roman/ pre-Napoleonic French law) but they explicitly recognized electronic signatures in 2006.
So, no, you don’t have to be aware of specifics that vary state to state. You can use email/PDFs/anything else to sign a document anywhere in the English speaking world.
Just to put one alternative company into the fray, there's Docsmore (https://client.docsmore.com/features.html), a local startup (North Carolina) that offers document management / signing / document flow as a service. I'd imagine it would be hard to go up against a giant like Docusign unless there are compelling additional features.
The Docsmore founders seem to have more recently used the service as a jumping-off point for a separate insurance claims-processing automation company, Benekiva (https://www.benekiva.com/) (Iowa/North Carolina). That seems even more lucrative than straightforward document signing/data-collection.
EDIT: I have no relation to the company, I've met some of the founders before
We're the team behind https://forwardemail.net
Everything 100% transparent, open-source, privacy-focused, with fair pricing
I'm just wondering about the commitment that you will never increase prices - that seems kind of unsustainable? Even if cost goes down over time, inflation tends to move pretty fast these days, quickly eroding your real earnings.
The important thing to consider is how much would it cost you to build/deploy a solution to send and request signatures from clients? Lawyers, developers, and security professionals are all needed and can quickly push the cost to build much much higher then paying for a service.
As for the valuation, it's also high in part because the market segment is so large.. anyone and everyone doing business online is a potential customer.
Disclaimer: I work for HelloSign. My experience here is from having seen many companies try to build it themselves only to return as customers a few months later.
The most sophisticated includes having an agent video chat with you and verify your identity when signing. If that won't hold up, then you'll probably have problems with an in person wet signature too.
It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy.
Fast forward:
Subprime crisis
Bernanke says "subprime is contained"
Subprime was not contained
Wheels come off in 2008
Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off
Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions
Bernanke proposes QE, something that he claims "works in practice, but not in theory"
Slow recovery
More panic
More QE
Temper Tantrum
More QE
13 years of regular QE
2 years of QE on steroids due to COVID
Asset prices only go up
Everything bubble
And here we get to the current scenario where scam companies are worth trillions and Docusign is worth 50B
I don't want to go into details but depending on which country you need your signatures to be legally binding and the type of contract you are signing, you might need a higher signature standard than the one you get from DocuSign.
At Skribble we offer all 3 signature standards defined by the European law. The lowest standard is very similar to what you get from DocuSign.
Also, at Skribble you get 2 signatures per month for free and a pay-as-you-go model for individuals.
I'd be happy if you give it a try at [1].
[0] https://www.skribble.com/en-eu/ [1] https://my.skribble.com/signup/
It seems that DocuSign has been suiting up on eIDAS signatures, too[0]; I'm not sure if they're compliant with the Swiss snowflake ZertES though since that one's incompatible with eIDAS.
[0] https://www.docusign.co.uk/how-it-works/electronic-signature... ("Easiest-to-use, eIDAS compliant digital signature solution, including EU Advanced and EU Qualified Signatures")
The same way I'm not going to take any claims from the product manager of a new VPS company that they're more secure than AWS.
Most enterprise software is purchased to do something the company requires, but is not within the company's actual line of business. Payroll, tax calculations, identity verification, etc.
In these cases "cheap" is not very important so long as the solutions are cheap enough relative to the value of what the company's business. This is also why companies routinely contract out vast amounts of work to highly-paid lawyers - paying someone six figures to do work on a deal that's worth 9 figures is a rounding error, and is not a cost worth optimizing.
More importantly, the third party provides two important pieces: responsibility and liability. Docusign is on the hook if they fail to validate the signers' identity, and if anything goes awry Docusign is on the hook for fixing it. These are features, not bugs, to enterprises who need a function performed but really do not want the liability or responsibility around it.
This is similar to why tech companies outsource to cloud services rather than run on their own metal.
Well, it's kind of like plumbing. Once established, you don't think about it much until something goes wrong. Maybe someone notices, "Hey, our annual maintenance is $x, but I think the normal rate is only $x-y."
But unless it's time for a lot of belt tightening, making that change is pure risk if the system mostly works, problems are fixed quickly, etc. Because maybe you change plumbers, and there's a catastrophic failure that would have happened anyway, but now via the magic of post-hoc fallacies it looks like the change is what caused the problem. (And maybe it did! who knows?)
So there are many things in any organization that only get optimized/updated (or even just simple maintenance) when they become a noticeable problem. The old adage about not fixing what isn't broken-- you need to really be able to show a likely failure in order to make a preemptive change.
But many/most of us have probably also worked in environments that were far too conservative about changes, so that may be the more common problem.
There are two elements to the stock markets:
1) The traditional element in which people attempts to buy and sell companies at good values to produce a return
2) The portfolio construction, pure supply demand element. People have money sitting around and they need to try to find a way to at least protect that money from inflation so they have to try to put somewhere. And there are really only so many options, real estate, commodities, debt securities and equity securities. Most of the time people are generally just deciding between debt and equity (bonds and stocks).
Right now, debt is historically unattractive so everyone is in equities because it's better than bonds. ETFs further entrench this because most of the retail market is just dumping their money into things like "growth ETFs" that are going to buy things like Docusign because it's sector is "tech" regardless of if any of those people would actually personally invest in that company.
This is somewhat crazy sounding but it's not necessarily irrational. You do have to pick one of those categories if you want to at least try to not lose money to inflation and if everyone of them sound terrible you start looking for the least terrible.
The question is why is Docusign, specifically, valued at $50B while other tech companies, even those that are publicly traded, are not valued at $50B.
Obviously when describing a factor in the stock market your goal isn't to list every single influence but this one influence far and away dominates tech stock valuations
Unfortunately, a large portion of HelloSign's customer support team was affected by a reduction in force earlier this year, because Dropbox didn't want to pay salaries for support staff in high cost of labor areas, like San Francisco.
Now if interest rates drop to 1% you can spend $10k on the same company, get the same $100 and pay your loan.
So the value of a company that reliably generates $100 can change by a factor of 10 when interest rates change.
Right now, the real interest rate is basically zero. So to determine what a company is worth, work out how much capital it generates and divide by almost-zero.
Hence why every company is work billions...
No one has noticed so far :=)
A scanned signature is not a handwritten one and it leaves you with a sub-standart signature. But courts accept it while it even if its not to the letter of the law.
When you're buying an apartment for many multiples of that, it's Docusign or nothing.
My brother was scammed as a result of this lax security. A crooked business partner set up a plausible email address for him, and took out a loan in his name. He only found out when he started getting notices about missed loan payments.
- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
Most people don’t read through DocuSigns, partly because the platform makes them difficult/impossible to word search. It would be great if every email from DocuSign included a Word doc of the agreement you’re being asked to sign. Otherwise the platform can be manipulated by unscrupulous people who take advantage of how hard it is to review documents on the platform.
You might be able to argue that you had not truly assented to the modified provision, using emails exchanged back and forth to show what the parties had agreed to prior to the DocuSign email. But it would be an uphill battle to prove this, so it’s always better to not have your signature on a document whose provisions you don’t agree with (IAAL).
For a company with a heavy legal, purchasing, or HR department, all of which are very document heavy, having everything automated and electronic saves a ridiculous amount of people-hours and effort.
Actual signed contracts need physically storing (securely), especially in regulated environments, they need passing around, they need to be discovered. Just searching for old contracts is a terrible waste of time and money.
Moving to an all electronic environment allows big savings in not needing a bureaucracy around that document management. Regular members of those departments can get docs distributed, signed, stored, and recalled trivially.
After a year of companies all working remotely, the savings alone of not physically mailing documents around must be a huge chunk of that estimate. If you've ever bought a house, gotten through immigration work with lawyers, signed corporate purchasing agreements, etc. you'll have seen the thick wads of paper that need over-nighting between companies at crazy expense.
Having looked at both DocuSign and HelloSign recently, DocuSign seems to have the better integrations into more corporate systems, and was preferred by our docs heavy departments.
Personally I use Preview on macOS and have never had anyone reject my signature for anything.
multi party agreements and especially the ones where you are the one needing others signatures (e.g. share holder agreement) and DocuSign are a match made in the heaven. It can send reminders to parties, show you who to nudge and let you download the final version. Compare that to print and put signature workflow.
One of the requirements is that certificate has to be issued by accredited CA. And there is one such CA - National CA (https://pki.gov.kz/), it issues such certificates for free.
Also there is a service that allows anyone to sign any file using a certificate issued by National CA - https://sigex.kz, thus making it legally significant. It's free for use (except for heavy RPS enterprise users and the ones, how need support).
So in Kazakhstan you can do e-docs signed by e-signs totally for free.
P.S.: Pardon, but the links are in Russian.
- Kazakhstan man-in-the-middle attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...
- "Certificate cannot be trusted" warning in Kazakhstan https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/certificate-cannot-be-t...
- Kazakhstan Attempts to MITM Its Citizens https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/threat-intelligence/kazakhs...
Your use case unfortunately is just not worth it to them in comparison.
One may as well ask "Why does Adobe charge $30/mo for Photoshop?"
The top solutions in this market must know the sSign compliance rules in many countries, and industry-specific compliance within each country.
Long-tail eSign solutions that are able to focus on a specific industry, country, or niche are more likely to charge per transaction, or a low subscription fee.
So for your lease agreement use case, the Lenders/Landlords likely have several SaaS options at their disposal for one-off transactions.
https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...
And something like documents signatures is so inherently based on trust that unless it was built by a large company and made open source.
Instead, the pathway to trust was decades of slow growth and bootstrapping (of trust) from a small startup DocuTouch, acquisition, investment in legal analysis and lobbying, a few key early partners, etc... And then you find yourself as the defacto trusted vendor.
Note that I'm putting aside questions of security etc. Assuming no wide-scale high-profile breach or fraud, actual security in this space is secondary. Legal acceptability is more important, especially since any moderately complex contract is going to have other stages and processes that ensure the correct parties are the ones signing the contract. Or at least be no worse than similar risks IRL.
Legally binding, court-accepted levels of trust are simply orthogonal to the goals of open source software. However, we're now at a point in the acceptance of digital signatures that a startup that happens to open source its code could still disrupt the market. The most around any such business would be the expensive legal expertise and legal bills required to defend their products in court when they are inevitably questioned in contract disputes or possible frauds.
I have to admit, over the past two years I've run into two pieces of professional software that made me think, dang, this thing actually works and is a material improvement on the old state of affairs. One was Fusion 360 and one was DocuSign. (I say this as a casual user of both relevant categories of software.)
I don't know if this makes it worth $50B, but they have a happy customer in me.
And now that they have a huge user base, they're going to use that push out whatever new products and features they can. And because document signing is used by basically every department in every industry, there's a lot of things they can add:
- Non-Repudiation features using Digital signatures - this is where Docusign (and hellosign and friends) is clever in using a LTV Enabled [0] Digital Signature on signed documents that allows the documents to be validated in Adobe reader. This IMHO allows them to get around lot of retention and compatibility requirements of eSign act. Adobe Digital signature verification is visual and you don't need an audit of your SaaS vendor to verify that the electronic signatures made will be available to validate 10 years later. keep in mind, Adobe requires a certificate issued by one of the ATL member issuers [1] - this is adding to the moat these companies have.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26090558/what-does-not-l... [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/approved-trust-list1.html
Unfortunately if you need a digital certificate solution you are stuck with purchasing a document signing certificate from one of the ATL issuers [1] and Digitally signing your documents with a visible signature.
That said, I’ve seen my employers discuss the high cost of the service. Usually they go with it because it’s the dominant player/trust and by the time they’re worried about costs it’s highly integrated into many workflows in many departments and difficult to move away from.
Docusign has competitors, but every company in the space has a powerful incentive to move upmarket instead of providing basic features to small companies.
Docusign has some content marketing that hints at all of the features they sell to large enterprises.
https://www.docusign.com/blog/what-is-contract-lifecycle-man...
They aren't as richly valued (in terms of EV/sales multiples) compared to other enterprise software companies despite slightly above average growth rates and an R&D margin 10 percentage points lower than average. In this market, they actually seem cheap or fair-valued based on a quick glance at comparables. For example Asana, is trading at ~60x+ forward revenue, despite being in a more competitive space with much less stickiness (contract signing is more essential than project management).
That act has since largely ceased to be enforced because operators of monopolies prefer that they not be, and tend to control budgets larger than the enforcers'; and because university schools of economics funded by monopolists have invented and promoted threadbare ideologies that interfere with effective enforcement. They have been aided by numerous corrupt judges who are allowed to establish binding precedents ("case law") weakening the law.
Thus, abusing monopoly power to eliminate competition is A-OK, provided your prices do not get "too high" until after all competitors have been eliminated and unassailable barriers to entry have been established.
Unfortunately, trust doesn't come for free. If a random, free-to-use company is used as a root-of-trust for document signing, who would trust that? It is a meaningless party to trust. There needs to be a reason to trust.
However, I probably use it less than 1/3 of the months that I pay for. This is true for dozens of memberships: Adobe, Canva Pro, Netflix, HBOMax, The Economist, etc.
It'd be nice to have a service that automatically unsubscribes me after every use, but rejoins seamlessly the next time I sign in.
If I pay for a month of Netflix on Jan 1 and immediately unsubscribe, I'm good to use it until Feb 1. If I don't log in for a week, it'd pay on Feb 8th and unsubscribe again. I'd have til March 8th to watch, and I'd save ~25%. For less frequently used services I might save 50% or more this way.
And there is easyID[1]. Who are similar to docusign but with a per signature fee (around 10cent). They also habe a nextcloud integration [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia
(yes, "free to use" means tax-funded, no need to point this out)
They still do those basic features. But the product has become more complex over the years. Not sure where I stand now.
Please add Zoho Sign to your evaluation list. We have a Free plan - 5 documents/month and our API plan is charged per document/signature.
We also offer unlimited document signing, tighter integrations, and a reliable technical assistance for all our users.
While selecting an e-sign app, users should consider legality of the app's signature and how it complies with their local laws. The market is also overcrowded with over 200+ e-sign apps and decision-makers prefer the most popular ones for these reasons: legality, ease-of use, technical support, scalability, security and privacy.
We are just four years into this e-sign space and companies both small and big are loving Zoho Sign. Give us a try. DM for any help.
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho
I use the built-in signature tool in Preview on MacOS all the time without issue.
If you’re the one collecting the documents I guess it depends on whatever the regulations are in the industry that you’re in. You might check out Docassemble. It lets you build workflows for creating documents from questionnaires. https://docassemble.org/
It can do signatures too. https://docassemble.org/docs/questions.html
Personally I give little credence to questions about tech valuation. Either it’s rational or irrational, and that is up to each and every investor to decide and literally nobody else.
Context for future readers: the stock price for Docusign fell 40% in one day the week after OP asked this question.
Who is the "other party" to this contract? What forms of signature will they accept?
As an accountant, the answer is a lot of companies sign hundreds of documents every month. I alone send around a hundred documents for digital signing every year and I’m not management. Also most solutions are shit right now, so a lot of money to be made from those who can make a good solution.
You pay per document, there's no monthly fees.
Companies use and pay for a lot of technically unnecessary things.
As an individual, we certainly would think twice to spend $xxx/month.
But as a business, the psychology of money is totally different.
I use hellosign. Free for the first 3 docs you sign a month. WFM.
Docu’s fundamental business is worth $5B at best.
tl dr; Typed signatures are legal in a digital form if the form states this is a signature block. There is no need for a third party such as docusign.
Further verification standards have been adopted, but not required, to identify typed signatures. The most common is the leading "//". So my legal signature would look like this:
//William Hagan
