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Comment by azianmike | Hacker News Reader

A couple of months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?”

Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?”

Turns out not that hard.

In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/

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FYI: DocuSign’s moat/USP is trust, not software.

DocuSign customers buy trust.

For a cheaper alternative from a trusted company, Google Docs has the feature.

Firefox has it built in now, too

Trust and Regulation like QTSP and all the other red tape

Really? Trust to send an email with a link? What else is making it trustworthy?

You’d be surprised how much trust people place in legal departments, balance sheet strength and talent capacity. All things for which I had to turn down superior technical proposals in the past. The old saying „Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“ still runs strong.

Free e-signatures are a great idea, have you considered getting a foundation to back the project and maybe taking out some indemnity insurance, perhaps raising a dispute fund?

That big companies use it for their important legal contracts.

its a well recognised tool for contract agreements, and you pay the money so that you are indemnified for any oopsies that might happen in transit.

Because when you send a document for a $75MM contract to be signed you want to send it via a well known and trusted document signing platform like Docusign where you know everything is legit and legally defensible.

For a weekend, this is incredibly well done.

https://penneo.com/ is a good alternative. And while I applaud your effort to do something in this space, personally I'd prefer a solution that's been thought over by lawyers, etc. Faster is not better in this particular space.

Documenso[0] is a pretty cool alternative that is increasingly compliant with more and more e-signature standards

https://documenso.com/

agree.com is free though

And Adobe Fill & Sign.

Didn't someone else do this recently and then DocuSign sued them?

Dude hell yeah

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