Send a PDF for signature

Open the request builder and pick the PDF. Sending needs a free login, because the dashboard, the reminders, and the audit record all have to belong to somebody.

Enter the signer's email, then drop the fields they need to complete onto the page. At least one signature field is required before the request can go out.

Press send. They get an email with a private link, you watch the status on your dashboard, and when the last signature lands everyone gets the finished PDF with its certificate.

An email with a private link. They tap it and land on the document with their own fields marked, on whatever device they happen to be holding. No account, no password, no app.

They agree to sign electronically, fill what is theirs, draw or type a signature, and press finish. If something looks wrong they can decline with a note instead of leaving it hanging, and you hear about it straight away.

Six kinds: signature, initials, date, name, free text, and checkbox. Pick a kind, click the page, drag the box to size. Each field belongs to a specific recipient, so the person signing only ever sees their own. Placing at least one signature field is what makes a request sendable.

The send screen today takes one signer plus an optional cc address. The signer gets the fields and does the work; the cc gets the finished copy when it is done and nothing to fill in. Under the hood the system already handles several signers with a routing order, so requests going to more than one person are next on the list rather than a rewrite.

Once a request is out, changing the document means cancelling and sending a new one, which is a worse look than a two-minute check. Fix the date, the price, and the name first in the editor, then send.

Most contracts have blanks that belong to you, not to the signer: amounts, dates, addresses, terms. Fill those yourself before you upload, and leave only the fields the other person actually has to complete. Fewer fields on their screen means fewer questions coming back.

The dashboard shows where each request stands. Sent means the email went out. Viewed means the link was opened. Signed means it is done. Knowing that a contract was opened three days ago and not signed is more useful than wondering whether the email arrived at all.

The Remind button emails them again with a fresh link and retires the old one, so the newest email is always the one that works. One reminder per person per day, and three at most on top of the original invite. If they changed jobs or you typed the address wrong, Resend sends the link to a corrected email instead.

A decline closes the whole request, emails you their reason if they gave one, and kills every signing link. Cancelling from your side does the same thing on demand. Either way the document stops being signable at that moment, so nobody can complete a version you have already pulled.

30 days from the send. After that the request expires on its own, the links stop working, and you get an email about it. That window exists so a link forwarded on and forgotten does not stay live forever.

An audit trail is a record of everything that happened to the document, kept so the signature can be checked later. Ours logs the send, the moment the link was first opened, the moment the document was viewed, the signer agreeing to sign electronically, and the signature itself, each with a timestamp, the network address, and the device.

The entries are chained: each one carries a fingerprint of the one before it, so a row cannot be quietly altered or removed after the fact without the chain breaking. That is what tamper-evident means here.

Every finished request comes back with certificate pages attached to the PDF: a reference id, the document title, checksums of the document before and after signing, who sent it, and a block for each recipient with their email, when they consented, when they signed, their network address and device, followed by the full event log. The checksum is the part that matters in an argument. Anyone can recompute it on the file and see whether the content changed after signing.

This one is different from the rest of the site, and worth being plain about. Signing a document yourself happens entirely in your browser and the file never leaves your device. Sending a document to somebody else cannot work that way, because the other person has to be able to open it. So the PDF is uploaded and stored while the request is live.

It moves over an encrypted connection, only people holding a valid link can open it, and the file is deleted 30 days after the request finishes, is declined, is cancelled, or expires. The audit record and the certificate stay, because deleting them would destroy the proof the signature rests on.

It does not verify who the signer is. There is no ID document check, no knowledge-based quiz, and no phone verification, so the identity behind the email address is taken at face value. It does not issue an advanced or qualified electronic signature under EU eIDAS rules, and it does not do Aadhaar eSign in India. Documents that need any of those need a certified provider. For a lease, an offer letter, an NDA, or a client contract, a standard electronic signature with an audit trail is the normal instrument.

Free: 3 signature requests every 30 days, up to 2 people per request (the signer and a cc count as one each), audit trail and certificate always included.

Pro: unlimited requests and up to 10 people per document, for $3.99 a month. No watermark on any plan, on either tier.

Most tools in this space start around $10 per user per month and keep their free caps out of sight until you are halfway through. Ours are in these two lines.

If the only signature needed is yours, none of this applies. Open the file, place your signature, download. That runs entirely in your browser, needs no account, and has no cap on how many documents you sign.