If you're paying $25–$50 a month for eSignature software but only sending a handful of contracts, you're almost certainly overpaying. Pay-per-use eSignature tools like GoodSign exist precisely for this situation — you pay per document sent, not per seat, not per month.
Here's how it actually works, and why it makes more financial sense for most small teams than any subscription plan on the market.
The model is simple: you buy credits, you spend credits, you only buy more when you need them.
With GoodSign, each envelope costs $1.50. An envelope can contain multiple documents sent to one or more signers — so you're paying for the transaction, not the page count or the number of people involved. You load credits into your account, send documents when you need to, and your balance draws down accordingly.
There's no monthly fee sitting on your card whether you use it or not. No annual commitment. No "you've hit your plan limit" walls.
Credits are purchased upfront and live in your account until you use them. When your balance runs low, auto top-up kicks in automatically — you set a threshold and a refill amount, and the system handles the rest. You never get caught mid-contract with a depleted account.
This makes it genuinely hands-off. You're not logging in to manually buy credits every time you have a busy month, and you're not paying for a subscription during the quiet months when deals slow down.
It's the eSignature equivalent of a prepaid model — predictable, controllable, and no surprises on your statement.
This is where the math gets interesting for growing teams. Most subscription tools charge per user per month. Add three people to DocuSign's business plan and your cost triples. That's the business model they're built on.
With a pay-per-use approach, your entire team uses the same account at no extra cost. Whether it's one freelancer or fifteen people across a small agency, there are no seat licenses and no user limits. Everyone can send documents, and you only ever pay the $1.50 per envelope fee.
For agencies managing contracts across multiple clients, or small businesses where the owner, ops person, and sales rep all occasionally need to send agreements, this is a meaningful difference. You're not doing headcount math every time someone new joins.
Let's put real numbers on it. A typical small business or freelancer might send somewhere between 10 and 30 documents a month that need a signature — proposals, contracts, NDAs, onboarding paperwork.
At $1.50 per envelope:
Now compare that to a DocuSign Personal plan at around $15/month for just 5 envelopes, or their Standard plan pushing $45/month per user. If you have two people sending documents, that Standard plan doubles to $90/month — for the same 30 documents that would cost $45 under pay-per-use.
The crossover point matters. Subscriptions only make sense at high, consistent volume. Below roughly 60–80 envelopes a month per user, you're likely paying a premium for the brand name and the unused capacity.
The people who benefit most from signing documents without a monthly fee are exactly the ones most subscription tools underserve: freelancers with variable workloads, small agencies with fluctuating client pipelines, and businesses that are growing but not yet at enterprise sending volume.
Speed matters. A contract sitting unsigned for a week is a deal stalled, a project delayed, a payment not yet triggered.
65.3% of documents sent through GoodSign are signed within 24 hours. That's not a goal — that's what actually happens in practice. The signing experience is clean and mobile-friendly enough that most recipients complete it the same day, often within a few hours.
For freelancers especially, fast turnaround on agreements means faster project starts and fewer awkward follow-up messages asking if someone had a chance to look at the contract.
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