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Comment by kritipinto | Hacker News Reader

Hi - one of the co-founders of DocuSeal here. Thanks so much for upvoting us.

As a quick summary about us: we offer the basics of document signing for free like what DocuSign and the like would give you in their paid product (unlimited document sending, mobile signing, stripe integration) via open source/self-hosted or free tier cloud hosting.

We cover our business costs by having Enterprise focused features as paid offerings (API/Embedding, custom logo branding/domain, SSO/SAML etc).

Please feel free to ask any questions and we'll do our best to answer them today.

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None of the features you bill as "enterprise focused" are limited in usefulness to large enterprises. Everyone doing anything beyond trivial would likely benefit from one or more of these features. I get the need to have a working business model, I just find the way it is presented a bit frustrating. Still yet, thank you for creating open source software. Even a half-complete open source solution is better than no open source software! I really appreciate all open source contributors of all sorts! Thank you.

If they "would likely benefit" then they should show that via paying for the product, whether it be labeled "enterprise" or not.

Are you proposing that no useful code should ever be open source, because someone may use it for benefit without paying for it?

Open source code can be charged money for, if the author so chooses, and there are lots of companies with this business model. Even setting that aside, I never proposed that (of course I and many others use open source code freely), but I was just commenting (generally, not necessarily towards you) on how much entitlement there usually is in the open source community, as if it's not enough to make something for free but that people even complain if the creators ask money for it.

Thanks for the clarification. I have no problem paying money to support open source development, or to pay for support or sponsor open source features I need, etc. I don't use non-open source code for anything critical in my business, and avoid it whenever possible even outside of critical functions. That includes proprietary extensions to open source cores.

I don't mean to sound entitled, I always want to express gratitude to developers for contributing to open source. But I will say that I would never pay for proprietary features- not because I don't want to pay, but because I want open source features, and I am willing to pay for open source features.

True, I definitely don't use non open source stuff for my business either, on the code side, but I definitely do use user land applications that aren't open source, for example Google sheets or QuickBooks for accounting, because user land applications are not necessarily something that there are good alternatives for that are open source; I'd never use OpenOffice over Google sheets.

Just for the sake of security, SSO should never be an enterprise only feature, yet almost everybody locks it behind high prices.

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