Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature
cheapesignature.com
cheapesignature.com
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.
Frequently statements which start like this also, unintentionally, tend to be great examples of bikeshedding themselves.
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.
This seems to be a rather self referential point :)
- 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.
EDIT: Another example: NameCheap. Great service. Nobody cares that it has that in the name.
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".
- 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.
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.
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.
I suspect the next iteration of the product/company will have a different brand name.
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
> 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.
As a technologist, I would appreciate something more for less, like a record of of the signature's provenance.
But at least do yourself a favour and find another merit to sell your product on that isn’t ”cheaper than the usual guys”
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.
It’s chasing short term growth in lieu of long term stability.
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.
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.
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.
Stop scamming people
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.
But for personal use or occasional use, yeah, being limited to subscription plans really sucks.
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.
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.
Genuinely: on what grounds are you thinking?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
All of zoom’s serious competitors do 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.
Now for $2 you can help people stop using Adobe. :)
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.
Not all usecases are 1 on 1.
They aren’t as bad as Ticketmaster. But their brand goodwill is similar.
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.
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.
Will signature APIs be free in 10 years? [0]
/mindslight/ mindslight
(ref: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/sigexamp... )
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.
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.
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!
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.
On my phone it’s painful to do the same task.
So we did it to ourselves. Don’t complain now, pay up.
Open PDF Attachment > Trigger “Markup” > Sign > Save > Send Back
I’m on iOS. It’s done quite nicely to be honest.
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.
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).
This is the reason organizations pay for it, despite already having email.
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.
Furthermore, likely your email provider does know what IP address you connected from.
Maybe they're dealing with massive amounts of anti-fraud stuffs.
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.
It is just a digital picture of your signature.
Two very different things, but in some cases that is sufficient.
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".
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?
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.
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.
The services being discussed are the higher-level tools.
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)