Nearly every e-signature platform charges per user, per month. You buy seats. The seat is the unit.
We charge per document. I want to explain why, and then be honest about when the other model is the better deal — because it sometimes is, and you will find that out eventually whether or not I mention it.
What a seat actually bills you for
A seat bills you for the option to send, not for sending.
Think about who in your company needs to send something for signature. Your HR lead, obviously. Someone in sales. The founder, occasionally. The office manager who sends the vendor agreement twice a year. The person who handles compliance declarations each quarter.
That is five people. Under a seat model, that is five seats, every month, forever. Two of them will send fewer than ten documents this year. You are paying a recurring fee so that a person who signs off on something twice a year could, in principle, do it more often.
The alternative most teams reach for is worse: share one login. Now your audit trail says the same name signed everything, which defeats a large part of why you bought the platform.
What we bill for instead
Documents. You send one, it costs one. Nobody needs a seat to be added as a sender, so the office manager who sends two agreements a year costs you two documents a year.
There is a second thing that follows from this, and it matters more than people expect: adding signers to a document does not multiply its cost. A vendor agreement with four signatories is one document. Under per-signatory pricing — which is common in India — that same agreement costs four times as much.
One clarification so the arithmetic stays honest: Aadhaar eSign credits are billed separately, per signature. A four-party agreement signed with Aadhaar uses one document from your plan plus four Aadhaar credits. Both rates are published on our pricing page, and I would rather you saw that here than discovered it on an invoice.
When a seat is the better deal — genuinely
If two people in your company do all the sending, and they send constantly, buy a seat somewhere.
That is not a rhetorical concession. Once a seat is paid for, additional sends on the better platforms are effectively unmetered, and the per-document model simply cannot compete with unmetered. A three-person team sending hundreds of documents a month should not be buying documents one at a time. They should buy three seats and stop thinking about it.
The dividing line is roughly this: per-document billing wins when sending is spread thin across many people. Per-seat billing wins when sending is concentrated in a few. Count your senders, count your monthly documents, and see which shape you are. If you are the second shape, we are the wrong choice and I would rather say so now.
The part that is philosophy, not arithmetic
There is a version of this argument that is purely commercial, and I have made it above. There is also a version that is about what kind of company we want to be.
A subscription is a bet that you will keep paying whether or not you use the thing. A great deal of software revenue depends on that gap between what people pay for and what they use. It is lucrative and it is a slightly rotten way to make a living.
Billing for documents means our revenue moves when your usage moves. If you have a quiet quarter, we earn less. That is the correct incentive, and it keeps us pointed at making signing genuinely useful rather than making cancellation slightly annoying.
We wrote separately about building the product to be easy to leave. This is the pricing expression of the same idea.
Work it out yourself
Two numbers: how many people need to send, and how many documents you send a month. Every price we charge is on the pricing page, including Aadhaar credits. We publish nobody else’s, because prices change and a stale figure helps nobody — but their pricing pages are one click away, and the comparison takes five minutes.
If the arithmetic points somewhere else, go there. I would rather lose the deal than have you work it out in month eight.
— Nivid, founder of Accordsign
