What DocuSign actually costs, and why we stopped paying it

Good Seal exists because of an invoice. We were paying a per-seat subscription at our studio to send perhaps a dozen contracts a month, and the renewal notice prompted the obvious question: what does sending a document for signature actually cost to provide?

The unit economics of an envelope

Sending one document for signature means, in full:

• Storing a PDF. Contracts are small — a few hundred kilobytes. Object storage is priced per gigabyte-month, so this rounds to nothing.
• Sending two or three emails: the invitation, a reminder, the completed copy. Transactional email runs in the region of a hundredth of a cent each at any volume worth discussing.
• Stamping the filled fields onto the PDF and computing one signature. Milliseconds of CPU.
• A few rows in a database.

Add it up and the marginal cost of an envelope is a fraction of a cent. The real costs of a signing business are engineering, support, sales and compliance — none of which scale with the number of documents you happen to send.

So why is it priced per envelope?

Because it can be. Envelope pricing is not cost-recovery, it is value capture: a contract is important, so the moment of sending it is a moment you will pay for. It also produces the pattern everyone recognises — a plan with a cap you did not notice until the month you were busy, and an upgrade prompt at the exact moment you cannot afford the delay.

There is nothing improper about that. It is simply not a constraint we have, because we are not running a signing business. We built the thing we needed and the marginal cost of letting it also serve you is, again, a fraction of a cent.

What the alternatives actually offer

The open-source options are real and worth knowing about. Documenso is the best known, and its hosted free tier caps you at a handful of documents a month — which is where this project started, since that cap is below what a small studio sends. Self-hosting removes the cap and adds a server to run, a database to back up and an email domain to warm up.

That trade is fine if you want it. Good Seal is what we wanted instead: no cap, no seats, no envelopes, and nothing to run.

What we give up by not charging

Worth saying plainly, because it matters more than the price:

• There is no account manager, no phone number, and no contractual uptime commitment.
• There is no qualified signature tier, because issuing those requires being an audited trust service provider.
• The roadmap follows what we need at our own studio first.

If you are signing regulated instruments, or you need somebody to be contractually liable to you when a signature is challenged, buy the enterprise product. That is what it is for. For ordinary commercial contracts between two businesses that trust each other enough to be doing business at all, you are paying for a moment that costs a fraction of a cent to provide.