esignatures.io could be a nice solution. I’ve used them for client projects and they have a simple API, too. They have a $0.49 per contract pricing model.
Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
21–30 of 348 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#22Sign a piece of paper and scan it. No cost.
Docusign and other services like it do more than send out forms to collect signatures. There often are other fields / data collected, alternative forms of documents presented depending on target party's profile, etc. If you take the sign/scan/send form, the receiving company still needs to do all the work to put that form in the right place and perhaps extract further data for further steps in some data pipeline. Docusign et al will presumably integrate straight into your document flow, much simpler in the long run with fewer people.
Just to put one alternative company into the fray, there's Docsmore (https://client.docsmore.com/features.html), a local startup (North Carolina) that offers document management / signing / document flow as a service. I'd imagine it would be hard to go up against a giant like Docusign unless there are compelling additional features.
The Docsmore founders seem to have more recently used the service as a jumping-off point for a separate insurance claims-processing automation company, Benekiva (https://www.benekiva.com/) (Iowa/North Carolina). That seems even more lucrative than straightforward document signing/data-collection.
EDIT: I have no relation to the company, I've met some of the founders before
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#23As with many situations with enterprise software vs. roll-your-own solutions (FOSS or otherwise): reliability, responsibility, and liability are the reasons. Most enterprise software is purchased to do something the company requires, but is not within the company's actual line of business. Payroll, tax calculations, identity verification, etc. In these cases "cheap" is not very important so long as the solutions are…
>and is not a cost worth optimizing.
Well, it's kind of like plumbing. Once established, you don't think about it much until something goes wrong. Maybe someone notices, "Hey, our annual maintenance is $x, but I think the normal rate is only $x-y."
But unless it's time for a lot of belt tightening, making that change is pure risk if the system mostly works, problems are fixed quickly, etc. Because maybe you change plumbers, and there's a catastrophic failure that would have happened anyway, but now via the magic of post-hoc fallacies it looks like the change is what caused the problem. (And maybe it did! who knows?)
So there are many things in any organization that only get optimized/updated (or even just simple maintenance) when they become a noticeable problem. The old adage about not fixing what isn't broken-- you need to really be able to show a likely failure in order to make a preemptive change.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#24My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter.
Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose DocuSign anyways.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#25Unrelated to open source, but DocuSign is literally one of the examples i list when explaining why the tech sector is over bought. They've tripled their market cap since the beginning of the pandemic, and while there is some merit to work from home, their moat is laughable. There are plenty of alternatives to DocuSign that should make share holders terrified... Adobe Sign, Panda Docs, HelloSign - i wouldn't even bet against notarize.com
Someone is going to roll a decentralized ID system on blockchain and tank this whole sector...
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#26> legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF. IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptanc…
I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign.
Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#27> legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF. IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptanc…
id also bet their backend does all kind of fingerprinting of who/what signs a document to ensure they can make the electronic signature defensible.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#28Because there is a natural monopoly in being a trusted provider of legal transaction services. Both for integrations and for the fact that no one wants to risk their job saving a few dollars on digital signatures. And no one wants to explain to a future acquirer / legal inquiry / judge / whatever that they are using some weird alternative. “We process the contracts with Docusign” is a safe thing to say. If that wasn’…
100% agree. We looked at sourcing different providers for a project, but for things involving trust, the known brand is an easy choice.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#29Now really sure that it'll help you, but in Kazakhstan digital signatures can be legally significant (have equal significance as hand-written signatures) in case if several requirements are met. One of the requirements is that certificate has to be issued by accredited CA. And there is one such CA - National CA ( https://pki.gov.kz/ ), it issues such certificates for free. Also there is a service that allows anyone t…
The KZ government PKI has had quite the history:
- Kazakhstan man-in-the-middle attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...
- "Certificate cannot be trusted" warning in Kazakhstan https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/certificate-cannot-be-t...
- Kazakhstan Attempts to MITM Its Citizens https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/threat-intelligence/kazakhs...
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#30As with many situations with enterprise software vs. roll-your-own solutions (FOSS or otherwise): reliability, responsibility, and liability are the reasons. Most enterprise software is purchased to do something the company requires, but is not within the company's actual line of business. Payroll, tax calculations, identity verification, etc. In these cases "cheap" is not very important so long as the solutions are…
>and is not a cost worth optimizing. Well, it's kind of like plumbing. Once established, you don't think about it much until something goes wrong. Maybe someone notices, "Hey, our annual maintenance is $x, but I think the normal rate is only $x-y." But unless it's time for a lot of belt tightening, making that change is pure risk if the system mostly works, problems are fixed quickly, etc. Because maybe you change pl…
As a side note, this can be a good thing. When a certain amount of change aversion isn't maintained, you get change for change's sake. Organizationally, you get every new manager trying to "make their mark" on things. Individually, you get developers trying to add "migrated product to $X shiny new framework" to their resume for their next job hop in 2-3 years.
But many/most of us have probably also worked in environments that were far too conservative about changes, so that may be the more common problem.