Priced by the document, not the seat
Why AiroSign charges for completed documents, what that breaks in the usual e-signature business model, and why we think it is the honest unit.
Every incumbent e-signature product prices by the seat. One sender, one seat, one monthly fee, and a quota of envelopes that is high enough that most customers never think about it. It is a tidy model for the vendor. It is a terrible fit for the thing we actually needed, which was signing inside a product that has one sender and thousands of signers.
When we built the signing step for our own products, the seat model produced a strange result. We had one API key doing the sending. By the vendor’s arithmetic that is one user. But the value being created was on the other side of the table, in the hundreds of contractor agreements and lease addenda that were being completed each month. We were paying almost nothing for a lot of work, and the vendor was quietly compensating by rate-limiting, gating the API to the top tier, and pushing a per-envelope overage that nobody reads until the invoice.
The unit that maps to value
A completed document is the unit that actually maps to value. Nobody cares how many people can log in to the dashboard. They care that the NDA came back sealed, with evidence, and that their system was told about it. So AiroSign counts completed documents and nothing else. Templates, signers, team members and API calls are not metered.
This has consequences we had to accept:
- Free has to be genuinely free. Ten documents a month with the full API and a sealed PDF, because a developer evaluating an integration cannot do it with a watermark and a demo mode.
- Overage cannot stop the flow. If a customer on the 250-document plan sends the 251st, signing continues. We ask them to move up next month. Halting a signature to enforce a quota is a bad way to treat a legal document.
- Migration has to be one line. If the argument is about pricing, the switching cost has to be near zero, which is why the API is DocuSeal-compatible. Change the base URL and the key.
What it costs us
Per-document pricing means our revenue is lumpier than a seat model. A customer who has a slow month pays less. We think that is fine. The alternative is charging people for a capacity they do not use and calling it predictability.
It also means the evidence has to be worth paying for. A PKCS#7 seal, a certificate page, and an append-only hash chain are what make a completed document something a court will accept, and they are what we are actually selling. The signature is the easy part.