I know bikeshedding about names is discouraged, but in the case of signatures, isn't there a desire to evoke a "trust" feeling? It's hard to tie "cheap" to "trust". Some other synonym like "eco" might project trust better.

I'll never understand using "cheap" for a company name, especially when people who require signatures are usually in very professional environments.

- They're positioning themselves to always compete on price, not offerings.

- It's professionally embarrassing to use a product named "cheap" anything. I have so much trouble recommending namecheap.com to my clients because of this. They're reliable and budget friendly but the word cheap makes them worry about trusting their domain name to them.

- "Cheap" refers to price but it can also refer to quality.

- I'd be surprised if lawyers weren't their #1 market and I can't imagine they'd be comfortable sending their clients to a "cheap" product.

I'm sure they did market research to make it worth using the name. I'd love to hear their take on it.

Who knows, maybe this domain name is only for the initial marketing rollout and the actual product will use a more professional domain name.

I thought the same thing about SurveyMonkey, but here we are—it’s used everywhere, including for all kinds of SeriousBusiness™ use cases. I think if the product is really good enough, nobody cares what it is called.

EDIT: Another example: NameCheap. Great service. Nobody cares that it has that in the name.

Different target personas.

SurveyMonkey is using a fun name for boring surveys.

NameCheap is positioning itself as the cheapest place to buy items that are already cheap. $5 at NameCheap vs $10 somewhere else.

If you sign a legally binding document for a property or a business deal, the last thing you want to hear is "let's do it the cheap way and save $1.75".

Regarding SurveyMonkey, pretty sure they changed their name to Momentive a while back.

Discount tire is the best tire place I have dealt with hands down. I still have people look at me like I am nuts because of the name.

The word ”discount” in their name makes sense to me. I see it totally different than the issue with “cheap”.

- Discount is only referring to price while cheap can refer to price as well as quality.

- They’re going after a different segment of the market. Business to Consumer clients are not expecting the same level of professionalism as B2B clients would.

- Maybe it’d be a concern if they only sold their own tires. You might figure lower price means lower quality products. However, they sell the same tires as everyone else. It’s easy to see that it’s just a price play, not quality.

In this case I think the bikeshedding is warranted.

I agree, the name seems antithetical to the concept that the brand really needs to get across, of a solid, trustworthy organisation serving as a proxy for obtaining legally valid signatures.

There’s nothing wrong with leading with the marketing message that this is a cheaper solution than the competition but the brand of the service still needs to evoke trust.

Luckily it looks like they have a bit of time prior to launch to consider whether this is something they may want to change.

Bikeshedding is never warranted, but this isn't bike shedding. Bikeshedding would be this name doesn't conform to pedantic reference A. The name going against the core value of a signature may be a simple observation but isn't a shallow one.

> Bikeshedding is...

Frequently statements which start like this also, unintentionally, tend to be great examples of bikeshedding themselves.

My comment was to encourage commenting when there's a meaningful thing to say regardless if it seems like a bikeshedding pattern.

These extra comments are noise and I don't even want to write this but note that we should avoid comments that don't have a positive purpose. Hopefully this one will lead to fewer of these.

> Bikeshedding would be this name doesn't conform to pedantic reference A.

This seems to be a rather self referential point :)

Unfortunately, 100% agree. When we signed purchase documents for our house, $2 for e-Signature was nowhere near the top 99% of costs/concerns :P. If our real estate agent sent us to "CheapSignatures.com", yea... we would've been uncomfortable. Irrational? Perhaps. Probably. But that's the gut reaction either way :|.

If their aim is to capture potentially larger market of lower-revenue transactions, something like "StreamlinedSignatures" or "VerifiedSignatures" or as you say "EcoSignatures" would be much safer.

Also, now I have to google what's "BikeShedding" :D

I guess you have already Googled the term, but just incase anyone else who needs a definition.

> Bikeshedding, also known as Parkinson's law of triviality, describes our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended.

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I started my first business (A PC Repair business) was to use the term inexpensive instead of cheap for this reason.

Budget friendly, low cost, entry level. All great alternatives to the word “cheap”.

Personally not a big fan of "entry level" esp when you are offering a service, comes with the feeling of inexperienced imo. The other 2 on the other hand, yeah, they seem fine to me.

Yeah, go for something like "quality signature" or something along those lines.

It’s dangerous to compare any cost to trust. The two concepts are independent and do not overlap from experience.

But at least do yourself a favour and find another merit to sell your product on that isn’t ”cheaper than the usual guys”

I disagree and don’t think of cheap as being bad. If used honestly, I think it’s a good way of using accurate language to describe a brand.

Sometimes a cheap burger or a cheap taco is the best. For signatures, I think this works. I don’t think I would skimp on important, non-commodity things.

I think it’s funny and off putting when brands try to overestimate their importance. I don’t want a “signature experience” just like I don’t want to “invest” in a $5 domain name. Just be honest instead of pretending like everything is part of my identity.

> For signatures, I think this works. I don’t think I would skimp on important, non-commodity things.

But it doesn't really work for signatures. If I'm signing things related to my mortgage, or VC financing, or an affidavit or something, it isn't equivalent to "cheap taco," but rather something like "fancy fine dining."

I'd be willing to pay a premium to ensure nothing goes wrong with the documents that will delay a closing process. And if I were a lawyer or similar professional, I think I'd also want to convey that premium image. I'm not buying a "signature experience," but I might be a buying house, where a want a "trusted transaction." Which is why I'm hiring a professional and not going DIY.

Agree, and I like "eco" - would add "frugal", "efficient", "wise".

As a technologist, I would appreciate something more for less, like a record of of the signature's provenance.

This looks like a Painted Door Test where the creator is testing the value proposition and the pricing.

I suspect the next iteration of the product/company will have a different brand name.

Do you mean - if a company charges more dollars per signature, would you trust them more?

I will never understand why so many products offer saas pricing when it is of no benefit to the consumer. I don't want to be paying $10/month for something I might only use a few times a year. Just let me pay as I go. I'm relieved to see that model here. Finally. I signed up and I hope other services will follow suit in the same way and relieve us of saas pricing fatigue.

Interestingly a startup I helped with some BI work, I advised then to change to a pay-as-you-go model instead of a monthly subscription and their sales revenue sky-rocketed.

The counter-argument to that is that pay-per-use discourages usage: "every time you use it, you pay" encourages you to be mindful about how much you use. You may not binge entire series on Netflix if you have to pay for each episode. You may justify a Photoshop subscription so that you have a powerful tool ready whenever you need it, but maybe you would think twice about making a meme if you had to pay for it (with money not just time).

I think it really depends on usecase. For something like e-signature, I can totally see how "pay per signature" makes sense - you wouldn't sign less documents to save a buck! On the contrary, you'd be comfortable keeping a contract knowing you only pay what you use, if you don't sign documents in a month, you pay nothing. So here probably a "subscription" model is a much harder sell.

Also there is a difference at a firm level and an individual user. If I have a company where this is used all the time (real-estate agency, law firm, etc) I might want the all-you-can-eat subscription model and not worry about usage. In fact, I might buy extras like white-label branding.

But for personal use or occasional use, yeah, being limited to subscription plans really sucks.

I agree. It is dependent on use-case but the majority of startups backed by VC choose the SaaS pricing model by default.

I do agree that in the case of something like Netflix a monthly subscription is a good idea, but there are many instances where pay as you go can work so much better.

Most recent example of this for me was a faxing app. I needed to fax a handful of pages for the first (and probably only) time in years, and they wanted me to sign up for a monthly subscription.

I'm tired of modern "subscriptions everywhere" too, but OTOH SaaS is burning money even if nobody's using it at the moment. AWS doesn't care if EC2 instance is idling :-) That cost is either included in pay-as-you-go price, or paid as a subscription fee.

Don’t use ec2 then?

Would you mind sharing that startup you advised?

Viddyoze.com

Pay as you go doesn’t scale.

It’s chasing short term growth in lieu of long term stability.

Pay as you Go scales until there is enough loyalty and demand that your users opt for a monthly fee to save money. By forcing everyone to a monthly fee you alienate a ton of users that want to use your service but not enough to need a subscription.

Again this isn’t true.

Pay as you go is a terrible decision to make and you see you all the time you it’s VC backed startups.

They are often forced to revamp their offerings down the line to a monthly fee.

The only ones you alienate are penny pinching HN users.

I hope you are being sarcastic. I’ll give two examples: about twice a year I need to (a) send something for signature digitally or (b) send something digitally to a fax number. If I can pay $2-10 for this, I will in a heartbeat and move forward. But it seems every provider wants me to sign up for a monthly plan as if these irregular needs will magically become regular. So instead I waste a ton of time driving to the library to use their fax machine or mailing a paper copy of my signature to someone. I would rather pay a premium to use something every now and then, but I won’t agree to subscribe. If these ever became more than irregular needs I would gladly subscribe to get a lower price per use.

I bet there are orders of magnitude more users like me, the sum of which would be a sizeable market. But instead every SAAS provider is focused only on regular monthly users, ignoring this shadow market. But it is a false dichotomy. Make it highly profitable but not scalable to do Pay as you Go, and then less profitable but scalable to go monthly. Do both.

They need to charge enough per unit of service to make it worthwhile. And people need to understand that they need to pay for services. Not everything is free.

Subscriptions are a good model for things that you use often and regularly. PAYG is better for things that have high value when you need them, but you don't need often.

I can see services like this offering both, and customers choosing one or the other based on their usage pattern.

You see this with movies already, and I think it works well: You can subscribe to the monthly and watch whatever, whenever. Or just rent movies when you occasionally want to watch one. Both are cool.

Well, you can't have it. If I need a service once a year, I won't pay a monthly subscribtion.

Cloud providers are pay-as-you-go, and as far as I can tell, they scale!

Yes rip offs scale

Stop scamming people

There are hundreds of free e-signature websites, why would I pay you 25 cents over them?

DocuSign has a brand behind it that pushes legalities of e-signatures and a huge base where if you say you signed with DocuSign people know what you mean.

"We'll send you an email to sign with our secure in-house service, it's like DocuSign?, and that'll wrap everything up!"

Yeah, won't work for most of the situations when the lawyers come, because the lawyers will claim the third-party website is bogus

"lawyers will claim the third-party website is bogus"

Docusign is bogus too.

Either you buy a real eIDAS-compliant certificate and sign things cryptographically, or you are faking it, broadly equivalent to "tick here to accept the agreement".

The only thing Docusign "proves" is that someone with access to your email signed the agreement.

That is for the EU. The equivalent regulations in the US are much more lax.

> The only thing Docusign "proves" is that someone with access to your email signed the agreement.

Also IP address and timeframe, which might be sufficient in the case of a dispute.

Still, I agree investment in better authentication is worthwhile.

> Also IP address and timeframe, which might be sufficient in the case of a dispute.

But that's roughly equivalent (but more convenient) to emailing each-other - your email provider will probably have records of your IP address too.

> lawyers will claim the third-party website is bogus

Lawyers accept any scribbled signature. The Preview scribble image cut and paste thing works fine.

Where this comes up is when there’s a disagreement that someone denies signing or there’s a forgery. And DocuSign doesn’t help much there because they aren’t a notary.

DocuSign works for the 99.9999% of times when no one contests it. And doesn’t matter much for the others.

A verbal agreement, and digital signature (with clear intent) is bogus?

Genuinely: on what grounds are you thinking?

So does Zoom, that doesn't mean we should perpetuate it.

But if you want to unseat Zoom, you need to be able to articulate a reason.

All of zoom’s serious competitors do this.

I would never ever use this.

I use DocuSign because I trust them to continue to be around. Why? Because Important Conpanies(tm) also use them.

$2 is absolutely irrelevant in the context of signing a document that is even remotely related to a financial outcome.

DocuSign is completely free if all you use it for is to sign documents and download the signed copy. They only charge you for using the platform to return or send documents to be signed. I've used it for years at no cost at all.

I used to use Adobe Acrobat to sign with a cert, but I stopped because of Adobe malware installing all over my computer. So I started using free docusign for exactly this, and then started paying the $2 to have others sign so that they didn't have to install Adobe.

Now for $2 you can help people stop using Adobe. :)

We use https://esignatures.io/ for a flat rate of $0.69 per sent contract.

Much easier than DocuSign (or HelloSign, which we were previously using). One feature to note is that with HelloSign, access to the API is prohibitively expensive.

I don't know why people think they need embedded PDF documents (rather than HTML) and hand-drawn signatures (rather than an auto-generated signature in a handwriting font) to make their agreements more legal.

EGreg's comment about the ESIGN Act sounds relatively simple, certainly less complex than the scope of problems that HNers would deal with every day.

Is this a symptom of "ooh, this looks legal. I better back away from it and/or surround it in increasing layers of disclaimers and waivers and/or adbdicate all responsibility to outsourced parties"?

It's also incredible how much understanding of the law, and how much fear of non-compliance can be assuaged, if you just RTFM. Legislation is available for free online and textbooks are relatively common.

When two parties are signing any non-trivial contract the $2 service fee is insignificant. Reducing it to $0.25 or whatever else isn't going to convince anyone to switch over. It's the brand that matters, and Docusign has successfully built it.

Imagine you are a real estate company that manages 10s of thousands of properties, and you have people sign an application fee, and then a lease agreement. If it’s trivial to switch over, why not save the 10s of thousands of dollars?

Not all usecases are 1 on 1.

The lifetime value of each lease is in tens of thousands of dollars. Multiply that by tens of thousands of properties. Is a few thousand dollars in savings really that significant in that context? The application fee is paid by the renter regardless. And the value they are getting is what I mentioned – the Docusign brand. I'm much more likely to trust an agreement that is hosted on docusign.com than cheapsign.com or whatever else.

DocuSign doesn’t have much of a brand. I don’t think anyone cares and their service isn’t distinguished. It’s just rent seeking.

They aren’t as bad as Ticketmaster. But their brand goodwill is similar.

HelloSign is free (for a limited number of documents per month). I've used it occasionally over the years it works great.

and backed by Dropbox

I read the ESIGN Act and I think other laws are probably similar. All the is required is a few components for a digital signature to be considered valid. Why do we need images of pdfs and docusign to make agreements? Wouldn't it be so much better to have people click to e-sign something on our own site, where we control the entire process AND make it easy to understand what things mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_signatures_and_law

All you need for a digital signature to be legally binding is:

  (i) Intent to sign & opt-out clause. ...
  (ii) Consent to do business electronically. ...
  (iii) Clear signature attribution. ...
  (iv) Association of signature with the record. ...
  (v) Record retention.

Why don't most companies just do it on their own site?

Because for pennies per signature (at scale) you (as a small business owner/realtor/someone with no technical background) don't have to worry about:

a) Document storage b) Securing said storage c) various and sundry potential legal issues

Those types of worries are the perfect market for a SaaS.

Signature attribution is a bit tricky. Interestingly, many esign providers use email as the authorization mechanism: you must have access to X email if you only can receive the secure link from this email. That makes the attribution component functionally as secure as your customers' email client.

If your email was included in dozens of data leaks, as is the case for most people, isn't that signature is worthless?

$2, or $0.25, what exactly is being paid for here? A promise that they'll verify that it's indeed me before I sign a document?

No, they in fact do not verify this at all. Anyone with access to the document link (which is usually sent over email) can sign it using any name they want.

I have the same question about what makes up the cost structure. How much does it cost docusign/hellosign etc to be the "notary"? FWIW the other signature providers have an enterprise sales process which is very negotiable. Pretty sure you can hit this price point at scale, but I hate doing enterprise sales negotiations.

Will signature APIs be free in 10 years? [0]

[0]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1460933265460801539

Electronic signatures are free right now. The heavyweight rigmaroles are just security blankets for lawyers.

/mindslight/ mindslight

(ref: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/sigexamp... )

I was _really_ confused why you signed your comment when the HN UI already shows who made the comment - then I remembered the context of the conversation :P

We see your username when you post, you don't have to sign it.

Just be glad my comment didn't consist of a URL pointing to a completed DocuSign.

woooosh

As others have commented, the brand moat is a challenge. My company built our own signing app (with an API!) [1] because high volumes of envelopes with DocuSign / HelloSign are exorbitant (you have to "talk to sales" if you have needs more than a few hundred per month).

We recently pivoted to the digital waiver space because signing waivers for experiences doesn't necessitate the same brand recognition. And lots of experience sites need an API that isn't way marked up.

[1] https://waivercat.com

Back when DocuSign first came out around 2003 the finance company I worked for was ready to sign up with them at an exorbitant rate.

From what I recall, President Clinton had just signed the e-signature bill in 2000 and all DocuSign seemed to be doing is combining a snapshot of a document along with someone's hand-typed name and generating an MD5 hash from it.

I proposed creating our own e-signature app that did that and we used it for the rest of the time I worked at the company (4 years). I think what others are saying - that you're buying the brand DocuSign - is true.

I work for a large PDF processing company (not Adobe) and true digital signatures are a bit more complex than that. Docusign actually uses our technology in their signing flow and it is a bit more complex than what you are describing.

A true digital signature ensures that the document is not altered after the document is signed. This is done by creating a hash of the document, encrypting it using a private key provided by a signing authority, and embedding that in a certificate that is then attached to the document.

When opening the signed document (in Adobe reader for example), the hash in the certificate is validated using a public key provided by the signing authority. If the document hash matches the certificate hash, then the document has not been altered!

That process has value when Party A and B each signed with their respective digital signature.

However, what happens with these signing websites is that WhateverSign signs the document with their own certificate - but makes no effort to verify that the person that signed the contract is truly who he says he is. So nothing stops me producing a Docusign contract with your name on it.

Isn't this the normal meaning of digital signature in computer circles? Where signature normally refers to cryptographic signing with a private key than with a squiggle on paper.

Docusign exists because the mobile os makers decided that the file system must be hidden from the user. In my Mac/pc it would take 30” to open a pdf attachment, sign it and send back the copy.

On my phone it’s painful to do the same task.

So we did it to ourselves. Don’t complain now, pay up.

DocuSign exists because there are various federal and state laws that regulate electronic signatures. Companies are required to make disclosures, collect affirmative consent, retain records, provide access to them to the person who signed, etc.

It's easier for most companies to outsource this to DocuSign than to do it in-house (and as others have mentioned, they're not paying $2 per signature at scale).

A signed document sent from my email address has the same properties.

So does an “ok” button on a website.

The “value add” of docusign is that they provide a workflow and auditable record of the event. Whether it’s worth the $0.25-$10 depends on the risks of dispute/litigation/etc.

I had to do something the other day that required a notarized wet signature. That stamp has no magical powers - but it provides evidence from a disinterested party that someone presenting my ID in fact appeared before them and wrote a mark on a page.

Docusign gathers information for the purposes of provenance and compliance beyond what is captured in an email.

This is the reason organizations pay for it, despite already having email.

Okay how do I capture the IP address of the person who signed the document over email?

What are you going to do with that IP address? I don't know what IP I had 5 years ago when I signed some documents, or whether I signed it from home. What does that IP address prove?

Furthermore, likely your email provider does know what IP address you connected from.

That and VPN, coffee shop, shared internet, etc etc. I don't get the point of needing an IP of a signed document either. Hell, you can draw a penis with your arm pit and call that your signature and federally it would be true... so maybe they have some niche (with strange ethics) requirements.

Maybe they're dealing with massive amounts of anti-fraud stuffs.

Folks we are in HN. Emails have headers with time stamps and everything.

My experience on mobile is:

Open PDF Attachment > Trigger “Markup” > Sign > Save > Send Back

I’m on iOS. It’s done quite nicely to be honest.

I do this too, but for actual legally-binding docs we always used HelloSign or DocuSign just to be safe, when doing business. It captures more info, provides disclosures, etc.

That's really easy to do on iOS these days. Maybe the last version or two. You can "markup" PDFs and include signatures, etc.

Now the ship has sailed. The files app was introduced I believe in iOS 11.

By that time Docusign was already multibillion dollar company with high market share, and the iOS users were not trained to use files anyway.

So even if you Can do it yourself, you are receiving a docusign link anyway.

Don't confuse the ability to scribble on a digital document with an actual 'legal' electronic signature.

DocuSign does not give you an eIDAS-compliant certificate, so what makes it any more legal than any scribble I can do myself?

Lobbying

Which law or regulation have they lobbied through? Or do you mean some non-government lobbying?

> pc it would take 30” to open a pdf attachment, sign it and send back the copy.

Windows only, comparatively, recently got built in PDF reading support through browsers. Prior to that you either installed acrobat and had Adobe try to shove free antivirus trials onto your machine with every update, or you were in the know and installed foxit.

And signing a PDF on a PC? Now day sure, but its been built into MacOS/OS X for ages.

Preview signing isn't a digital signature (meaining an ECDSA signature of the message HMAC with your personal certificate).

It is just a digital picture of your signature.

Two very different things, but in some cases that is sufficient.

On my phone it's painful can do anything so I'm using my desktop anyway. Someone that uses DocuSign is still going to make me 'DocuSign it'.

I'm not going to send someone an offer letter that is cheapesignature.com/sign-my-offer-letter. I'd look like a chump. Like the 'cheap' evokes some rando site and the 'esignature' makes me think of egold. The only e-prefix that works is email. Everything else has scamtones.

I'll use HelloSign and get Dropbox storage along the way and call it a day. Docusign is what people trust, but Hellosign is acceptable, but cheapesignature is too much. All the branding is "I'm trying to save pennies on a $20/mo product".

I pay $5 a month for 5 family members on 1password. I use it every day, it's as important as my credit card.

Every other subscription based service seems to target the $10 range, even if you use it only a few times a month. Theese costs add up, I understand the concerns of unexpected bills in pay-as-you-go, but it's also a lot easier than commiting to much more than you need. I don't have any movie-streaming subscriptions, but how is someone supposed to keep up with Netflix/Disney/HBO/Amazon Prime and the lot?

Can anyone describe the target market here? Docusign and others have monthly sub rates that would drive the per-signature way lower for large volumes.

I'm not sure if you're guessing, but DocuSign and Adobe Sign's per-envelope (not per signature) rate is expensive and doesn't scale down on volume as quickly as you'd think. In fact, to get lower rates.. you need to buy their "X" and "Y" products/addons (e.g. Contract Lifecycle Management).

Bottom line is, whilst the name of this new service is bad and would immediately get a no from our execs, there is a market for a pay-as-you-go service like what they're providing.. especially as it becomes commoditised thanks to the pioneers.

This makes more sense. And I was guessing based on a few google hits as I hadn't priced out this kind of solution before. Thanks.

I'd ask directly - can OP describe the target market? Is there even a target market, or is this a vaporware landing page, just trying to see if anyone will bite?

So many of the commenters here are going to be dismayed to find out that it's $0.25 per signature, but you have to deposit $10 at a time to buy nonrefundable signature credits. (I'm speculating that the publisher will want to be able to accept credit cards without losing money on each transaction.)

Subscriptions are a good model for things that you use often and regularly. PAYG is better for things that have high value when you need them, but you don't need often.

I can see services like this offering both, and customers choosing one or the other based on their usage pattern.

You see this with movies already, and I think it works well: You can subscribe to the monthly and watch whatever, whenever. Or just rent movies when you occasionally want to watch one. Both are cool.

I made a summary of the e-signature services out there:

https://chimkan.com/e-signature-2021-pricing-for-api/

$2 is probably neither here nor there for the majority of situations when you sign documents, but DocuSigns UX is terrible. I would focus on improving that.

Is $2 a signature really a big hurdle? If i'm paying a lawer a thousand dollars to write a contract, I really don't care about $2 to sign it.

What benefits do products such as DocuSign or cheapesignature have over digital signatures provided by open source libraries such as NaCl [1]?

[1] https://nacl.cr.yp.to/

I'm pretty sure NaCl does cryptographic signatures. Docusign is a way for a human to "sign" a document with their computer - the legal equivalent to writing your name on a physical contract.

About that: highly depends. E.g. here in Germany, a properly done cryptographic signature is equivalent to an ink signature on a paper contract. Docusign is not. (Some delivery startup recently found out the hard way, when they discovered that parts of their contracts with workers were invalid due to that, and they thus had given them permanent contracts where they had intended them to be temporary)

Sadly the digital signatures are uncommon, because well, its a digitalisation effort in Germany, of course nobody did anything competent about actually implementing it. (e.g. a while after creating those laws, ID cards were changed to be smart cards too. And instead of just giving everyone a usable cert on one of those that's a paid extra)

We don't live in a world where everyone is a software engineer.

> NaCl's goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools

The services being discussed are the higher-level tools.

An incredible level of polish and ease of use.