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Comment by propter_hoc | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I've developed a lot of this sort of tool. For some reason, Adobe E-sign services (formerly known as EchoSign) rarely comes up, but it's actually quite good and cost-effective to develop with.

Docusign is indeed pretty terrible as an API, but it does have the benefit that users have heard of it so it has a certain institutional credibility - which is usually important if you're developing the sort of app that needs an e-signature process. On that front, all of our clients were very comfortable with Adobe as a secure service provider - it was something we publicized, in fact.

I've played a bit with Hellosign. While I've heard they have a nice API, they don't have the institutional credibility that Docusign and EchoSign have. Also, their pricing was way, way higher than EchoSign's, in my experience. I'd love to learn more about them, though.

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Saw this article and was familiar with the headaches of esignatures. HelloSign is very pretty but I've been using Adobe Sign for years now. When we had to switch from Business to Enterprise (I don't remember what limitation required the upgrade but it was business critical - edit: ah yes, I remember being able have a clickable link that generated a new one for each person). There was some friction because the support and people working on it seem to be handled by a different group of Adobe. There were two different logins, kinda weird. Couldn't sign up through the site and had to do a manual contract. After dealing with the technical team the migration worked and all is well, very nerve wracking time thinking you lost all your contracts. We had backups but still.

Anyways, one of the biggest issues with other services was the max amount of templates imposed by HelloSign and the rest. It feels very arbitrary yet Adobe can handle this at scale very cost effectively.

The UI needs work and some quality of life changes need to happen. I feel like it's been somewhat abandoned after the acquisition. If I need to edit a template with one tweak I have to completely redo the entire contract/document which is time consuming especially on multi-page contracts with tons of fields of different types.

We're married to it now and it does work but I would love to see enhancements or have Adobe at least get a few new designers and UI/UX people onboard.

Can you give any guidance on Adobe/EchoSign's API pricing? Seems like it's behind a "contact us" enterprise plan these days? https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/sign/pricing/plans.html

It generally seems ridiculous to me that it's 2019 and APIs like https://app.hellosign.com/api/pricing are priced per signature request. Even if each finalized signature comes with regulatory retention requirements, that's far from a linear cost... and these are PDFs we're talking about retaining, not videos. The whole ecosystem reeks of price fixing.

Yeah, there's little I hate more than opaque "contact us" pricing. To my surprise when I inquired EchoSign was actually much cheaper than the alternatives. At the time, I had an API license from EchoSign that cost a few hundred dollars a year for a very large number of monthly document signings, with no hard limit (but polite requests to buy additional licenses if you went above the limit). I don't know if they've kept this pricing model though.

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