<story><title>Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?</title><text>I have been searching for a solution to e-sign some lease agreements. It is something that I need to do maybe once a year and the only thing I need is a legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF.  I do not need any fancy features.&lt;p&gt;I was doing research, and it seems like most document signature companies all charge monthly subscription fees! This does not work for me as I am not using the platform on a monthly basis.&lt;p&gt;Are there free, open source alternatives to Docusign? If so, why do more companies not use them?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tgsovlerkhgsel</author><text>My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It&amp;#x27;s known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you&amp;#x27;re a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that&amp;#x27;s nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose DocuSign anyways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>I don’t think this premise is correct; I don’t know of any evidence that courts accord any special status to Docusign’d documents, over other ways of electronically signing contracts.&lt;p&gt;The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract.&lt;p&gt;There probably is a “nobody got fired for buying Docusign” effect, but it would be supported by their mindshare, not some special status in courts. The vast, vast majority of Docusigned docs will never end up in a court anyway (most contracts are never litigated).</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?</title><text>I have been searching for a solution to e-sign some lease agreements. It is something that I need to do maybe once a year and the only thing I need is a legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF.  I do not need any fancy features.&lt;p&gt;I was doing research, and it seems like most document signature companies all charge monthly subscription fees! This does not work for me as I am not using the platform on a monthly basis.&lt;p&gt;Are there free, open source alternatives to Docusign? If so, why do more companies not use them?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tgsovlerkhgsel</author><text>My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It&amp;#x27;s known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you&amp;#x27;re a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that&amp;#x27;s nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose DocuSign anyways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adventured</author><text>&amp;gt; DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it&amp;#x27;s borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They&amp;#x27;re entrenched, potential future monopolist tech monsters.&lt;p&gt;The market loves these types of stories, right up until the growth inevitably declines to&amp;#x2F;near single digits and then they get a boring eBay valuation (circa ~2003-2019).&lt;p&gt;The short of it is, a lot of the future returns have been pulled forward.</text></comment>