Kind of tangential, but I'll share a bit of a horror story from a friend when it comes to e-signatures.

The company in question uses DocuSign, and most of their clients do as well. They are big, serious companies. However, nobody is able to set up DocuSign in a reasonable way for a multi-client contract. Every company needs to use their own DocuSign.

Now, DocuSign embeds a cryptographic signature in the signed PDF. This means you can't sign a PDF twice.

So what my friend does is create the PDF to be signed, send it to one company for signatures, get it back and run it through Microsoft Print to PDF. This friendly utility happily strips away all cryptographic signatures, but importantly leaves the "signature picture" in place. And then they can send this PDF to the next company.

I joked that every time they do this, a cryptographer somewhere stubs their pinky toe on a corner.

> Last week, we started building signwith.co/

And this week the product’s launched? That doesn’t inspire confidence in what’s supposed to be a legal matter, and trust seems to be the #1 thing you need in this business if the tech is so trivial. Putting signatures on PDFs is free, if I can’t trust your ability to resolve legal disputes I’ll use free instead of paying you whatever your idea of cheap is.

The problem with being in this space is that you need to have the financials to be around for long enough to be useful. For legal documents, that means a 3+ year horizon.

Right now, you might work for low-risk (meaning, essentially no risk of contract disputes) short-term gigs for freelancers and consultants, but you're a no-go for businesses of any size, or anyone else that needs a contract signed.

You need to demonstrate stability before you can expand from the short-term niche, or else that your signature/document validation service will survive the likely death of your company.

“the e-signature space” shouldn’t exist. Slapping signatures on pdfs that get emailed to the relevant parties isn’t a legitimate industry, it’s just a small and overblown app that eventually people will self host or bundle for free with an existing document SaaS.

It’s a feature, not a company. It’s definitely not a whole industry.

> This event expanded the market with such massive awareness.

I think you might be overestimating the impact of this (whatever 'this' is) on the rest of the world that isn't trying to make signatures a business. This is the first I'm hearing that Google has introduced a (new?) signature feature, and the Google trends for "Electronic signature" haven't moved much if at all [0]. A Google search for "Google signatures" still mostly turns up information about email signatures, including when I filter to the News tab.

I'm honestly not even 100% sure what new feature you're talking about. In my searching I don't turn up any announcements about Google and signatures, and I do find a help article about it going back to 2022 [1].

In short, I have no idea what sparked this for you, but for the rest of us it's Tuesday. It might be good to slow down and figure out what's actually going on and what its real impact is?

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12315692?hl=en

All legal docs pages seem broken (at least on mobile).

I’m your target customer but would never use this because it inspires no confidence that when the shit hits the fan (ie: contract dispute) your signing tool will stand up to legal scrutiny. The sales page is all about being cheap and mobile responsive, but it doesn’t mention anything about the legality of document signatures processed through the tool, or the data security/privacy standards you uphold.

> No hidden cost

I couldn't find the price per document in the home page.

OP, agreed something better than DocuSign is required. Check out Estonia’s digital signature platform — been around and developed for a couple of decades as the entire country runs on it.

In other words, it’s a solved problem, just little known outside the EU. And it works really well! Second, I suspect there are things to learn from the platform they built and the way digital signatures can be trusted within an entire society. DocuSign is astonishingly bad not because of the tech alone but because of the approach.

(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!)

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!

You guys gotta include the price and your main competitor that I was about to start using is esignatures.io which is email or sms at 0.50 each so would love a comparison!

I think the contact page might be broken on Firefox/android. I just get a fairly sizable whitespace with a twitter link if I scroll far enough. (I'm assuming there's supposed to be a contact form and/or email address. I'm old, I can't imagine using twitter for business communications.)

At first you want to keep it to a minimum which is not that hard. But in order to get more clients you will have to deal with more cases and add features. Which is what others have already done …

I can't see the price per document anywhere on your website

This is a good idea and I'm glad to see it out there, solving a real problem. I used to be a consultant and could've used this.

So how much is it?

You must give other details on where and for how long you store the uploaded documents

Whats your pricing? API plans? We currently pay about $0.20 per signature.

Neat!

Your pricing + testimonial link seems broken.

Why do people make this slop when you can just use acrobat reader? Lol

My sugestion is to change the title to "Show HN: SignWith: Get e-signatures & pay per document" or something like that and keep the explanation of the problem only in the description.

> That said, we see Google's entry in the signature space as validation.

I agree, it's a good new, but very scary.