Show HN: Get e-signatures & pay per signed doc

If you think about it, the worse is just this kind of cargo cult to do the same thing that is used to be done with paper on a computer without really understanding why you do it.

Like, on paper, you are supposed to all "sign" the same paper document to show that this is the same document/content that is agreed by everyone. And so, when you DocuSign it, people do the same thing with everyone signing the same document even with a fake "handwritten" signature....

But if you really think about it, the signature already proves the content, so you would only have to have all the parties sign individually their own "copy" and then exchange the signed pdf signed by them. If you own a copy signed by you, and a copy signed by another person, as we have the proof of the content of each one, you know that it is the same contract that was agreed...

Best of luck to you. We spent the last 18 months trying to build and sell a contract management and esign tool for freelancers and agencies and we got almost universal feedback that it wasn’t needed. Hope your outcome is different than ours!

pdf signatures are certainly not worth nothing, in fact they are eIDAS compliant. It's just the government being the government so it's left hand doesn't trust the right one.

What eIDAS actually solves is not signatures, but strong identification. You log into the system and it knows your tax id or whatever primary identifier you have. It's promoted as a secure way to sign documents, but it's just technofetishism.

Non-repudiation isn't even a technical problem, as you can have verbal contracts too. Replying to an email is totally fine way to enter into a contract too, but something like invoices have to be signed or stamped (or both). If you request something from the government (in the Netherlands), ticking a checbox and pressing a button is totally legit and you don't have to dance around ECDSA for a single moment, because the left hand trust the right hand.

Now if somebody is conspiring with a tax officer to commit VAT refund fraud and then telling to the judge they didn't send any refund and never got any money -- it's not checkboxes and pdfs to blame really.

>(Signature spots are mimicking pen signatures. Why not avoid that, or generate them based on the digital signature, eg as a visual / printable representation then digital signature, the way a QR code carries bits? Make something that survives printing!)

That's the actual unsolved problem of digital documents.

Regulatory technofetishism requires digital signatures strongly tied to identifiable person (natural or otherwise). eIDAS solves that perfectly, as long you have a digital id issued by your government of residence (the one expecting to connect the document through the signature to a primary key in their database). Nobody except a few governments here and there actually use it and when they do it's mostly a closed system with controlled access anyway.

What people actually need (i.e. how people really work with documents) is a PDF with a signature visible in all PDF viewers, that you can also print and bring to a local government office if they for some reason have in-person process for it. Now in theory, you can have PDF fields and fill them with digital signatures produced by your eIDAS-compatible qualified id. Nobody (almost) ever does that, because your typical workflow doesn't require extracting strong identity from the signed document. The fact that adobe viewer operates on a different chain of trust compared to eIDAS doesn't help.

So what people do is adding signatures as content to the document, than signing it digitally with pdf fields sequentially. It works fine, but you can't add another content-signature on top for obvious reasons and you can't counter sign if the field wasn't present before (and document is locked).

Add: to even start properly solving this, one needs to understand how documents generally work, how (federated) governments work, read the actual law, also understand cryptograrphy and PDF format and after all that make a nice UX. And people who can mostly understand all of above have better things to be busy with, as there is no money in it anyway.

signrequest.com is still free, you can't beat that.