Why is Docusign a $50B company?

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter.

Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose DocuSign anyways.

In every big transaction,” said Leech, “there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient’s blubbering thanks.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

> legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF.

IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptance, legally speaking.

DocuSign's use case is not the signing, but the management of those documents and signatures - tracking which documents are sent, which have been read (yes, the doc owner can get notified when you even look at a Docusign document), which have been signed, and being able to store copies of signed docs. It is mostly for the companies sending you contracts, not for you as the signer.

I haven't found free, open-source solutions, but HelloSign[0] is a decent solution if you only need to sign documents a few times per year. Their free tier supports three documents per month. They make it look like they only have paid plans, but you can sign up without a credit card for a free tier.

[0] https://www.hellosign.com/

One of the things I dislike about DocuSign is there’s no linkage to the document used to create the PDF you’re supposed to sign. I was once sent a DocuSign email by a large/seemingly reputable company, and I read through it to make sure it was what I expected. It wasn’t — they had edited a key provision, in a way that favored them.

Most people don’t read through DocuSigns, partly because the platform makes them difficult/impossible to word search. It would be great if every email from DocuSign included a Word doc of the agreement you’re being asked to sign. Otherwise the platform can be manipulated by unscrupulous people who take advantage of how hard it is to review documents on the platform.

You might be able to argue that you had not truly assented to the modified provision, using emails exchanged back and forth to show what the parties had agreed to prior to the DocuSign email. But it would be an uphill battle to prove this, so it’s always better to not have your signature on a document whose provisions you don’t agree with (IAAL).

Because there is a natural monopoly in being a trusted provider of legal transaction services. Both for integrations and for the fact that no one wants to risk their job saving a few dollars on digital signatures. And no one wants to explain to a future acquirer / legal inquiry / judge / whatever that they are using some weird alternative. “We process the contracts with Docusign” is a safe thing to say. If that wasn’t good enough, a whole lot of other people would also be in trouble, so the collective hallucination that is our legal system will support it.

Unrelated to open source, but DocuSign is literally one of the examples i list when explaining why the tech sector is over bought. They've tripled their market cap since the beginning of the pandemic, and while there is some merit to work from home, their moat is laughable. There are plenty of alternatives to DocuSign that should make share holders terrified... Adobe Sign, Panda Docs, HelloSign - i wouldn't even bet against notarize.com

Someone is going to roll a decentralized ID system on blockchain and tank this whole sector...

Far more than just the cost of implementation and selling that, they're also selling the incredible savings of not having to track and sign documents manually.

For a company with a heavy legal, purchasing, or HR department, all of which are very document heavy, having everything automated and electronic saves a ridiculous amount of people-hours and effort.

Actual signed contracts need physically storing (securely), especially in regulated environments, they need passing around, they need to be discovered. Just searching for old contracts is a terrible waste of time and money.

Moving to an all electronic environment allows big savings in not needing a bureaucracy around that document management. Regular members of those departments can get docs distributed, signed, stored, and recalled trivially.

After a year of companies all working remotely, the savings alone of not physically mailing documents around must be a huge chunk of that estimate. If you've ever bought a house, gotten through immigration work with lawyers, signed corporate purchasing agreements, etc. you'll have seen the thick wads of paper that need over-nighting between companies at crazy expense.

Having looked at both DocuSign and HelloSign recently, DocuSign seems to have the better integrations into more corporate systems, and was preferred by our docs heavy departments.

Personally I use Preview on macOS and have never had anyone reject my signature for anything.

First a disclaimer: I am no lawyer, but I am one of the co-founders of Skribble[0], an e-signature provider from Switzerland.

I don't want to go into details but depending on which country you need your signatures to be legally binding and the type of contract you are signing, you might need a higher signature standard than the one you get from DocuSign.

At Skribble we offer all 3 signature standards defined by the European law. The lowest standard is very similar to what you get from DocuSign.

Also, at Skribble you get 2 signatures per month for free and a pay-as-you-go model for individuals.

I'd be happy if you give it a try at [1].

[0] https://www.skribble.com/en-eu/ [1] https://my.skribble.com/signup/

Now really sure that it'll help you, but in Kazakhstan digital signatures can be legally significant (have equal significance as hand-written signatures) in case if several requirements are met.

One of the requirements is that certificate has to be issued by accredited CA. And there is one such CA - National CA (https://pki.gov.kz/), it issues such certificates for free.

Also there is a service that allows anyone to sign any file using a certificate issued by National CA - https://sigex.kz, thus making it legally significant. It's free for use (except for heavy RPS enterprise users and the ones, how need support).

So in Kazakhstan you can do e-docs signed by e-signs totally for free.

P.S.: Pardon, but the links are in Russian.

Working on an open source alternative, email me at niftylettuce@gmail.com if you want to try the beta.

We're the team behind https://forwardemail.net

Everything 100% transparent, open-source, privacy-focused, with fair pricing

Because the market is batshit insane right now. Been investing for 30 years (started right after the Savings and Loan Scandal bust in the late 80's), and the insanity dwarfs the Dot Com bubble. People who don't understand the basics of investing always joke about how it is a casino, and that was always a little true, but now it is massively true.

Most of the documents people e-sign are related to business deals (contracts, NDAs, etc) or HR (offer letters) which are such high dollar value transactions that the cost of e-signing is negligible.

Your use case unfortunately is just not worth it to them in comparison.

If you want to e-sign lease agreements, you don’t need any special software. You can just have the signee type their name in the signature space and email the document back to you. The date of the email will be evidence of the timestamp, and the email records are commonly accepted in court. That’s just as legally binding as Docusign. The reason people use Docusign is to keep track of a large number of legal ageeements.

I paid for DocuSign's annual fee the year I bought my house because it was just that much easier to sign everything electronically. The only documents I signed in person were at the closing. Everything else was done electronically, which was beautiful.

I have to admit, over the past two years I've run into two pieces of professional software that made me think, dang, this thing actually works and is a material improvement on the old state of affairs. One was Fusion 360 and one was DocuSign. (I say this as a casual user of both relevant categories of software.)

I don't know if this makes it worth $50B, but they have a happy customer in me.

The US eSign Act is a good read. Its only 3 pages, but gives an idea of what is required for compliance in the US.

The top solutions in this market must know the sSign compliance rules in many countries, and industry-specific compliance within each country.

Long-tail eSign solutions that are able to focus on a specific industry, country, or niche are more likely to charge per transaction, or a low subscription fee.

So for your lease agreement use case, the Lenders/Landlords likely have several SaaS options at their disposal for one-off transactions.

https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...

As with many situations with enterprise software vs. roll-your-own solutions (FOSS or otherwise): reliability, responsibility, and liability are the reasons.

Most enterprise software is purchased to do something the company requires, but is not within the company's actual line of business. Payroll, tax calculations, identity verification, etc.

In these cases "cheap" is not very important so long as the solutions are cheap enough relative to the value of what the company's business. This is also why companies routinely contract out vast amounts of work to highly-paid lawyers - paying someone six figures to do work on a deal that's worth 9 figures is a rounding error, and is not a cost worth optimizing.

More importantly, the third party provides two important pieces: responsibility and liability. Docusign is on the hook if they fail to validate the signers' identity, and if anything goes awry Docusign is on the hook for fixing it. These are features, not bugs, to enterprises who need a function performed but really do not want the liability or responsibility around it.

This is similar to why tech companies outsource to cloud services rather than run on their own metal.

Enterprise customers are very sticky. Once a large company has standardized on a tool like Docusign, it's very hard to get them to change because it involves changing the behavior of thousands of people. No CIO wants to deal with that. It's not worth risking the new tool won't have a feature a group depends on, the CEO doesn't using it, or, after switching, it has an outage. At this point, Docusign has reach the "No one got fired for using Docusign" threshold, so it will be around a long time.

And now that they have a huge user base, they're going to use that push out whatever new products and features they can. And because document signing is used by basically every department in every industry, there's a lot of things they can add:

https://www.docusign.com/products

There are two main aspects solved by Docusign - Implementation of ESign Act - there are specific requirements that needs to be met for an E-Signature to be valid, such as Informing the signers of an option to opt out, retention of signature records etc.

- Non-Repudiation features using Digital signatures - this is where Docusign (and hellosign and friends) is clever in using a LTV Enabled [0] Digital Signature on signed documents that allows the documents to be validated in Adobe reader. This IMHO allows them to get around lot of retention and compatibility requirements of eSign act. Adobe Digital signature verification is visual and you don't need an audit of your SaaS vendor to verify that the electronic signatures made will be available to validate 10 years later. keep in mind, Adobe requires a certificate issued by one of the ATL member issuers [1] - this is adding to the moat these companies have.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26090558/what-does-not-l... [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/approved-trust-list1.html

Unfortunately if you need a digital certificate solution you are stuck with purchasing a document signing certificate from one of the ATL issuers [1] and Digitally signing your documents with a visible signature.

I don't think anyone believes from a traditional value perspective that it is.

There are two elements to the stock markets:

1) The traditional element in which people attempts to buy and sell companies at good values to produce a return

2) The portfolio construction, pure supply demand element. People have money sitting around and they need to try to find a way to at least protect that money from inflation so they have to try to put somewhere. And there are really only so many options, real estate, commodities, debt securities and equity securities. Most of the time people are generally just deciding between debt and equity (bonds and stocks).

Right now, debt is historically unattractive so everyone is in equities because it's better than bonds. ETFs further entrench this because most of the retail market is just dumping their money into things like "growth ETFs" that are going to buy things like Docusign because it's sector is "tech" regardless of if any of those people would actually personally invest in that company.

This is somewhat crazy sounding but it's not necessarily irrational. You do have to pick one of those categories if you want to at least try to not lose money to inflation and if everyone of them sound terrible you start looking for the least terrible.

I use docusign as you described, as landlord for a few properties, and I don’t pay anything. Somehow it falls under the free tier/limit.

That said, I’ve seen my employers discuss the high cost of the service. Usually they go with it because it’s the dominant player/trust and by the time they’re worried about costs it’s highly integrated into many workflows in many departments and difficult to move away from.

It's $50B because lots of people trust it to do something that is easy to understand and lots of the people trading have used it. The difficulty with replacing it by something open is that you need to host it somewhere securely, and you need to make it externally visible to have 3rd parties sign stuff And you need to get all your auditing spot on so that in 5 years time you can show that 'yes, Bob did sign that contract, so can we have $... from him'; which probably means it can't be hosted by you, but needs to be something an external party can audit. And the signing process has to be simple enough that managers/lawyers/CEOs can use.

Docusign is worth so much because--for their biggest customers--they effectively act as the entire operating system for the legal department. If you are a small customer, then you have not purchased the same experience.

Docusign has competitors, but every company in the space has a powerful incentive to move upmarket instead of providing basic features to small companies.

Docusign has some content marketing that hints at all of the features they sell to large enterprises.

https://www.docusign.com/blog/what-is-contract-lifecycle-man...

HelloSign. Great product, every bit as good, if not better than DocuSign. Every bit as valid and accepted. Very inexpensive. Their support, however, is literally the worst support experience I've ever had.

If interest rates are 10%, you can borrow $1000 and buy a company that generates a $100 dividend and be cash neutral. Make sense?

Now if interest rates drop to 1% you can spend $10k on the same company, get the same $100 and pay your loan.

So the value of a company that reliably generates $100 can change by a factor of 10 when interest rates change.

Right now, the real interest rate is basically zero. So to determine what a company is worth, work out how much capital it generates and divide by almost-zero.

Hence why every company is work billions...

They sell an enterprise solution for companies that sign thousands of documents a month, the market is huge as every co needs it. They hit the market hard and now appear to have major market share, successfully turning investment dollars into contracts and therefore revenue. I don't agree with other commentors in that they have any sort of moat besides their existing client relationships and brand, same as any incumbent. Looking at the business, it looks like that of Canva, Figma or Shopify, the de facto leaders is newish software categories with massive markets.

They aren't as richly valued (in terms of EV/sales multiples) compared to other enterprise software companies despite slightly above average growth rates and an R&D margin 10 percentage points lower than average. In this market, they actually seem cheap or fair-valued based on a quick glance at comparables. For example Asana, is trading at ~60x+ forward revenue, despite being in a more competitive space with much less stickiness (contract signing is more essential than project management).

This sort of thing is what they call a Natural Monopoly. It is what the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was created to regulate. The idea is that it is not against the law to have a monopoly, but there is a collection of rules that apply to you if you have one. You have, in effect, chosen to become a public utility, and then you are legally expected to act like one.

That act has since largely ceased to be enforced because operators of monopolies prefer that they not be, and tend to control budgets larger than the enforcers'; and because university schools of economics funded by monopolists have invented and promoted threadbare ideologies that interfere with effective enforcement. They have been aided by numerous corrupt judges who are allowed to establish binding precedents ("case law") weakening the law.

Thus, abusing monopoly power to eliminate competition is A-OK, provided your prices do not get "too high" until after all competitors have been eliminated and unassailable barriers to entry have been established.

It's a service every company needs and most aren't willing to build. This is in large part because most companies don't have the security expertise to handle sensitive data so it makes tons of sense to outsource. Even the companies that do have that expertise may not want to invest their resources outside their core business.

The important thing to consider is how much would it cost you to build/deploy a solution to send and request signatures from clients? Lawyers, developers, and security professionals are all needed and can quickly push the cost to build much much higher then paying for a service.

As for the valuation, it's also high in part because the market segment is so large.. anyone and everyone doing business online is a potential customer.

Disclaimer: I work for HelloSign. My experience here is from having seen many companies try to build it themselves only to return as customers a few months later.

I don't know what's legally binding in your jurisdiction, but in the US, scribbling on a PDF will suffice for most purposes. xournal++ is a free tool that will support this.

> Are there free, open source alternatives to Docusign? If so, why do more companies not use them?

Unfortunately, trust doesn't come for free. If a random, free-to-use company is used as a root-of-trust for document signing, who would trust that? It is a meaningless party to trust. There needs to be a reason to trust.

I use SignNow.com - the level of subscription I need is something like $8/mo.

However, I probably use it less than 1/3 of the months that I pay for. This is true for dozens of memberships: Adobe, Canva Pro, Netflix, HBOMax, The Economist, etc.

It'd be nice to have a service that automatically unsubscribes me after every use, but rejoins seamlessly the next time I sign in.

If I pay for a month of Netflix on Jan 1 and immediately unsubscribe, I'm good to use it until Feb 1. If I don't log in for a week, it'd pay on Feb 8th and unsubscribe again. I'd have til March 8th to watch, and I'd save ~25%. For less frequently used services I might save 50% or more this way.

There is ZealID[0] - which gives you a free QES (legally its equivalent to a handwritten signature and has to be accepted all over europe.

And there is easyID[1]. Who are similar to docusign but with a per signature fee (around 10cent). They also habe a nextcloud integration [2]

[0]https://www.zealid.com/en/consumers

[1]https://eideasy.com/

[2]https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/electronicsignatures

I just use the PDF sign feature which basically adds a picture of my signature to the document.

No one has noticed so far :=)

Estonia has had electronic signatures since 2002. Cryptographically signed PDFs (or any files), backed by the government, free to use, and widely used by common citizens. All you need is residency (an ID card) and a cheap USB reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia

(yes, "free to use" means tax-funded, no need to point this out)

I've used esignforms[0] to DIY document signing, its a bit complex to setup but what stands out to me is that the own authors do not endorse the software for legal purposes because the software has not been audited.

[0] https://github.com/OpenESignForms/openesignforms

I can only really speak to my early experience with them as a young company. They made internet fax bullshit easy. When I could easily store my signature and sign docs, then later when they added pdf interpretations, I was sold 100%.

They still do those basic features. But the product has become more complex over the years. Not sure where I stand now.

Hello,

Please add Zoho Sign to your evaluation list. We have a Free plan - 5 documents/month and our API plan is charged per document/signature.

We also offer unlimited document signing, tighter integrations, and a reliable technical assistance for all our users.

While selecting an e-sign app, users should consider legality of the app's signature and how it complies with their local laws. The market is also overcrowded with over 200+ e-sign apps and decision-makers prefer the most popular ones for these reasons: legality, ease-of use, technical support, scalability, security and privacy.

We are just four years into this e-sign space and companies both small and big are loving Zoho Sign. Give us a try. DM for any help.

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho

Because brands matter. They somehow cracked the nut of getting legal professionals to sign off on their service. Now, when the service costs very little compared to the context, why would you chose anything other than what your attorney recommends?

These are documents that you’re signing or that you’re collecting?

I use the built-in signature tool in Preview on MacOS all the time without issue.

If you’re the one collecting the documents I guess it depends on whatever the regulations are in the industry that you’re in. You might check out Docassemble. It lets you build workflows for creating documents from questionnaires. https://docassemble.org/

It can do signatures too. https://docassemble.org/docs/questions.html

One thing DocuSign has going for it and against it is its name recognition. Right now, a lot of places say they require DocuSign and for some places they are pretty rigid and inflexible so it really does have to be DocuSign but a lot of places just want the same security and authority DocuSign has to offer so the brand "DocuSign" is kind of becoming like "Kleenex" or "Coke" where people do not really care that it has to be DocuSign, they're just referring to the product offering.

For what it's worth, DocuSign is actually free to sign your own documents. You only have to pay to send it to someone else. The UI around the free versionis absolutely terrible.

So why is it 50b company?

Certainly the value of transactions that are authorized each month by DocuSign are north of $100B, and they alleviate a substantial about of transactional friction and risk. There is also a network effect in that accessing existing agreements establishes a relationship with all parties to these contracts.

Personally I give little credence to questions about tech valuation. Either it’s rational or irrational, and that is up to each and every investor to decide and literally nobody else.

I use https://www.signwell.com. It works really well and the free tier is enough for infrequent use.

SignWell (https://www.signwell.com/) has a free plan for simple needs.

Well this post certainly aged well.

Context for future readers: the stock price for Docusign fell 40% in one day the week after OP asked this question.

DocuSign is obviously crap. When I first encountered it, I couldn’t believe that anyone took it seriously. The only security is that you got the document at your email address.

My brother was scammed as a result of this lax security. A crooked business partner set up a plausible email address for him, and took out a loan in his name. He only found out when he started getting notices about missed loan payments.

It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In Australia for example, any technology that is accepted by both parties can be used. I have signed contracts with GnuPG (a long time ago) for example. I have also sent documents to my Remarkable tablet, signed them there and sent them back without it ever being on paper.

Who is the "other party" to this contract? What forms of signature will they accept?

I hate Docusign charging to use SAML. Biggest scam any company can do. “Pay us an arm and a leg to provide better security on your account.”

This is a great example of understanding a market. An engineer might think that a document management platform should have a great UX/UI and lots of bells and whistles. But that stuff is secondary to "a court will accept it." THAT is the product differentiator for DocuSign. "We are a document management platform that courts will accept." BOOMTOWN.

I don't agree with the motion that there should be free alternatives. Probably 99% contracts that require this level of scrutiny are for-profit so it makes sense to ask for money in exchange of this service. I would be _very_ vary of a free service that takes my contract info that often includes legal names, addresses, SSN, tax info, bank details, etc.

Because America has shifted from manufacturing economy to DocuSign economy. Soon people will find out that 50bn is new 50m though.

Visma Sign is about 1$/sign, check it out.

As an accountant, the answer is a lot of companies sign hundreds of documents every month. I alone send around a hundred documents for digital signing every year and I’m not management. Also most solutions are shit right now, so a lot of money to be made from those who can make a good solution.

Perhaps because dollars are worth less now.

Sign a piece of paper and scan it. No cost.

You can easily sign a document on Preview using Mac for free. Click the Show Markup Toolbar in the View or Edit section. Create and save your signature, then click the signature to add it to your PDF. I’m not sure why they don’t make this incredibly transparent on Mac, other than to help others profit.

Checkout hellosign much more approachable IMO. It has a free trial maybe you can get by with just that…

Hi Akouri, we are the same - we only need digital signatures on an ad-hoc basis, so we use Signable: https://www.signable.co.uk/

You pay per document, there's no monthly fees.

I thought an email exchange where both parties reached an agreement is a legally binding contract, even without the use any document singing apps like Docusign. Is there any jurisdiction where it isn't?

Companies use and pay for a lot of technically unnecessary things.

I call these kinds of companies commodity monopolies. Anyone could build them but now that one has emerged a winner there is so little difference between them you might as well use the one everyone else uses. Okta and PagerDuty are other examples.

They've become the defacto document signing platform with wide acceptance across industries and are treated as legally binding in many jurisdictions. They've essentially become the Google of document signing.

FYI since you mention Lease Documents. Specifically for Lease Documents Zillow has an upload and sign ( or in some states a free lease builder ) you don’t have to list a property just go straight to the leases section

You might have been on to something. Today it's a $30B company.

https://esignatures.io https://www.cheapesignature.com

If you need recommendations - I'm using this: https://www.sejda.com/sign-pdf

Businesses are willing to pay premium price for peace of mind.

As an individual, we certainly would think twice to spend $xxx/month.

But as a business, the psychology of money is totally different.

Fun technical fact - as of a few years ago they were only signing about a million documents a day. It's all marketing / enterprise entrenchement.

esignatures.io could be a nice solution. I’ve used them for client projects and they have a simple API, too. They have a $0.49 per contract pricing model.

To your second question, RocketLawyer has free document e-sign. We've been using them for our contracts for about a year now.

In somewhat the same situation. We need to sign docs electronically about 2x a year.

I use hellosign. Free for the first 3 docs you sign a month. WFM.

Adobe appear to have a solution that I used for free that is a webapp. And also I think there is a way in Preview to do this too.

Maybe you initiated Docusign’s downfall

It’s a bubble. All tech are trading at high valuations due to infinite money printing.

Docu’s fundamental business is worth $5B at best.

Enterprises generally don’t want or care about open source software.

A Docusign hack would be downright amazing. Among other things, you'd probably get to see how much big oil pays direct to dictators, or (more likely) the entities they control.

The US has had an Electronic Signature law since 2000: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-106publ229/pdf/PLAW...

tl dr; Typed signatures are legal in a digital form if the form states this is a signature block. There is no need for a third party such as docusign.

Further verification standards have been adopted, but not required, to identify typed signatures. The most common is the leading "//". So my legal signature would look like this:

//William Hagan

A zoom recording with a witness involved maybe?

Which competitors does DocuSign have?

Well...

Signable have a path plan

Can we have the correct title here? It’s a question looking for docusign alternatives?

You can use Adobe app

Oh it's a long story...where to begin?

It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy.

Fast forward:

Subprime crisis

Bernanke says "subprime is contained"

Subprime was not contained

Wheels come off in 2008

Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off

Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions

Bernanke proposes QE, something that he claims "works in practice, but not in theory"

Slow recovery

More panic

More QE

Temper Tantrum

More QE

13 years of regular QE

2 years of QE on steroids due to COVID

Asset prices only go up

Everything bubble

And here we get to the current scenario where scam companies are worth trillions and Docusign is worth 50B