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Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

cheapesignature.com

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Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#91

Post by jacobr1 »

virgilp wrote: post #79
krmmalik wrote: post #22

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…

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 m…

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#92

Post by ClumsyPilot »

lbittner wrote: post #64
300bps wrote: post #24

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…

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 provid…

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#93

Post by birdman3131 »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #66
tyingq wrote: post #4

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 b…

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#95

Post by jacobr1 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #63
rvnx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#96

Post by SavantIdiot »

com2kid wrote: post #50
whatever1 wrote: post #14

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.

> 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…

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#97

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jackconsidine wrote: post #54
EGreg wrote: post #38

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/…

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?

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#98

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

tyingq wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#99

Post by CallMeJim »

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.

Re: Stop paying DocuSign $2 for an e-signature

#100

Post by karmakaze »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #11
tyingq wrote: post #4

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.

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. Lucki…

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.
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