How e-signature pricing works, and which model suits you
Per user, per envelope, per seat with an allowance, pay as you go. What each model rewards, and the questions that decide which fits.
E-signature pricing looks confusing because vendors are not selling the same unit. Once you can name the four models and know which one you are looking at, comparing them stops being guesswork — and more usefully, you can work out which one your own pattern of use is punished by.
No prices appear in this article. The models are stable; the numbers change every quarter, and an article quoting them would be wrong within months. Ours are on the pricing page and nowhere else.
The four models
Per user. You pay for each member of staff who can send documents. Sending is unlimited, or capped high enough not to matter. The unit is your team.
Per envelope. You pay per document sent for signature, however many people sign it. The unit is the transaction.
Per user with an allowance. A monthly fee for a number of staff, including some quantity of sending, with a per-unit charge above it. Most of the market sits here, and it is where comparisons get hard, because two plans at the same headline price can have wildly different allowances.
Pay as you go. No monthly fee. You pay per document, from the first one.
What each one rewards, and punishes
The mismatch that costs money is always between the unit the vendor charges for and the unit that varies in your business.
Per user punishes a large team that signs rarely. A campground with nine seasonal staff who each need to send a handful of forms pays nine times for a volume that would fit in one.
Per envelope punishes high volume. A gym taking four hundred waivers a month, each trivial, pays four hundred times for four hundred near-identical documents. This is the model that makes waiver businesses wince.
Allowances punish seasonality. A twelve-month commitment sized for August is idle from November to March, and the allowance does not roll. If your year has a shape, this is the number to look at hardest.
Pay as you go punishes predictability. It costs more per unit by design. What you are buying is the absence of a commitment, which is worth a lot at the start and very little once your volume is steady.
The questions that decide it
Four, in order:
- How many documents a month, at your busiest and your quietest? Not the
- average — the range. If the ratio is more than about three to one, seasonal
- terms matter more than the rate.
- How many people need to send? Not how many people work there. Often it
- is one or two, and everyone else only needs the finished document.
- How many people sign each document? Where this is more than one, per
- envelope gets relatively cheaper and per signature gets expensive fast.
- Is the volume growing? A model that fits at fifty a month and not at
- five hundred is a migration you have scheduled without noticing.
The charges that are not in the headline
This is where quoted comparisons usually fall apart. Depending on the vendor, some of these are included and some are extra:
- Text messages, which are almost always metered separately, and billed per
- segment rather than per message
- Identity checks of any kind, usually per attempt, sometimes per attempt
- including the failures
- Your own domain on signing pages or sending addresses
- Branding beyond a logo
- API access, which on several platforms is a plan tier rather than a
- feature
- Extra storage or longer retention, which matters if your retention period
- is long
- Overage rate, the important one — what happens at allowance plus one,
- and whether it is a per-unit charge or a forced upgrade
A plan with a low headline and a punitive overage is a plan that is cheap in the months you do not need it.
Working out your own number
Take last year, month by month, if you have it. Count documents sent, not signatures. Count the people who actually need to send. Note your two or three biggest months and your two or three smallest. Then run the same twelve months against each model rather than against the annual total — the annual total hides exactly the seasonality that decides this.
If you would rather not do that arithmetic by hand, our estimator runs it against our own published rates.
Watch for the lock-in, separately
Price is a year's decision. Getting your records out is a longer one. Before committing, find out what an export contains and whether it includes the evidence around each signature or only the PDFs, and whether a document signed on that platform can still be checked by somebody who is not a customer of it. A cheap plan on a platform you cannot leave is not cheap.
SignSealer is not a law firm and this is not legal advice. This describes how pricing models are structured; what any particular vendor charges is on their own pricing page, and the only prices we publish are ours.
