Most businesses don't realize they're overpaying for eSignatures until they do the math. DocuSign's pricing structure isn't complicated by accident — tiered plans, per-seat limits, and feature gates are built to push you toward higher tiers. If you've ever wondered whether there's a cleaner, cheaper way to send contracts, there is. GoodSign charges $1.50 per envelope, no subscription required.
Let's run the real numbers.
DocuSign's Personal plan starts at around $15/month — but it's capped at one user and limited envelopes. The moment you need more than one person sending documents, you're looking at the Standard plan at roughly $45/month per user, or the Business Pro tier at $65/month per user for features like SMS authentication and custom branding.
For a 5-person team, that's $225–$325 per month just to keep the lights on — whether you send one document or a hundred.
That's the part that catches people off guard. You're paying for capacity you may never use. A freelancer who sends 8 contracts a month is paying the same monthly rate as someone sending 80.
Here's a concrete scenario: a 5-person agency sending 20 documents a month.
That's $195 in monthly savings, or $2,340 a year — for identical core functionality. And with GoodSign, all five team members can send documents without adding per-seat costs. Unlimited users is the default, not an upsell.
Now flip the scenario. Imagine a quieter month where your team only sends 6 documents. With DocuSign, you still pay $225. With a per-document eSignature model, you pay $9. The cost scales with your actual usage, not your projected usage.
The reasonable concern with switching from DocuSign is losing enterprise-grade features. That concern doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
GoodSign includes the features most businesses actually use:
These aren't stripped-down versions. An audit trail that logs every view, signature, and completion event is an audit trail. Small and medium businesses don't need anything more exotic than that, and most never use the features sitting behind DocuSign's higher tiers.
The 65.3% of GoodSign documents signed within 24 hours stat is worth noting here too — fast turnaround isn't a premium feature, it's just what happens when the signing experience is clean and frictionless.
To be fair: DocuSign's subscription model makes sense for specific use cases. If you're a large enterprise with a legal or sales team sending hundreds of documents daily, a flat monthly rate with advanced workflow automation, Salesforce integration, and dedicated support is worth evaluating.
But that's not most businesses. Most small businesses, freelancers, and agencies have variable document volume. A marketing agency might send 30 NDAs in January during new client season and 5 in August. A sole-trader consultant might close 4 projects a month. Locking into a subscription to handle peaks means overpaying every other month.
The DocuSign alternative for pay-per-use exists precisely because subscription pricing is the wrong model for variable workloads. Paying per document sent is structurally more honest — you pay for what you use, nothing more.
Beyond the monthly fee, subscriptions carry a subtler cost: the pressure to justify them. When you're paying $225/month for eSignature software, you start routing documents through it that don't need to be there. You add friction to workflows just to feel like the tool is earning its keep.
Per-document pricing removes that psychological overhead. You send a contract when
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