In 2023, DocuSign reported annual revenue of $2.5 billion. Its valuation has, at various points, exceeded $40 billion. The company has roughly 1.5 million customers paying monthly fees ranging from $15 to several hundred dollars, depending on how many envelopes they need.
An envelope, in DocuSign terminology, is a signed document.
Think about what that means. There is a company worth tens of billions of dollars whose entire business model is predicated on the act of drawing a mark on a piece of paper — or rather, a digital representation of a mark, on a digital representation of a piece of paper. It has built a global infrastructure, a sales force, an enterprise tier, an API ecosystem, and an integration with Salesforce, all to solve the problem of a person indicating that they agree to something.
Legally, in most jurisdictions, this problem was already solved. In England and Wales, the Electronic Communications Act 2000 gave electronic signatures the same legal standing as wet ink. The EU’s eIDAS regulation, adopted in 2016, did the same across Europe. In the United States, the ESIGN Act had already established this in 2000. A drawn mark on a document — even a typed name, even an uploaded image of a signature — is legally binding in most commercial contexts. There is no technical or legal reason why that mark needs to travel through DocuSign’s servers to be valid.
And yet here we are.
DocuSign succeeded because it arrived at the right moment with a good enough product and sold it to enterprise customers who needed a paper trail and a vendor they could point to during an audit. It created trust through process — the emails, the audit logs, the certificate of completion — even though the underlying legal act didn’t require any of it. It turned a simple operation into a workflow, and then sold access to that workflow on a subscription basis.
This is, in fairness, quite clever. But it also created a strange situation where millions of individuals and small businesses pay a monthly fee to sign documents they already own, using infrastructure they don’t need, because the alternative — figuring out a different way — seemed complicated.
The alternative is not complicated.
Your browser can do this. When you draw a signature on a canvas element, the browser captures the strokes as vector data. That data can be rendered to an image. That image can be embedded at an arbitrary position on an arbitrary page of a PDF using pdf-lib, an open-source JavaScript library that runs entirely in the browser. The resulting file is a standard PDF with an embedded image — the same output DocuSign produces, minus the server, the account, the monthly charge, and the audit trail that most personal documents don’t need anyway.
The signature doesn’t become legally binding because DocuSign processes it. It becomes legally binding because you drew it and attached it to a document and sent it to someone who received it. The chain of intent is the thing that matters. The server is theatre.
There are cases where the theatre is worth paying for. Enterprise transactions with multiple signatories, compliance requirements, regulated industries — these are contexts where DocuSign’s audit trail has genuine value. But most people using an e-signature tool are not signing M&A contracts. They’re signing lease agreements, freelance contracts, consent forms, offer letters. Documents where the legal requirement is simply that they indicated agreement, not that they did so through a specific piece of infrastructure.
For those cases, the subscription model is a tax on a problem that doesn’t exist.
fwip’s PDF signer works entirely in your browser. Draw, place, done. Try it →