Usign vs DocuSign, on published pricing.
DocuSign sells seats with an envelope allowance attached. Usign sells signed contracts. If your volume is lumpy or high and your sender count is small, those two shapes produce very different bills.
Everything below uses DocuSign's own published self-service pricing, annual billing, taken from their pricing page on 10 September 2026. No estimates, and we pick the cheapest DocuSign plan that fits each volume rather than the most expensive.
What one signed contract costs you
Effective price per contract at each annual volume, on list pricing.
DocuSign's line is jagged because seats come in whole numbers: 250 contracts needs three seats and you pay for 300 envelopes. That is the shape of seat pricing, not a quirk.
The same numbers, in full
Annual cost, USD, annual billing. Usign has no seats, so sender count never changes the bill.
| Contracts / year | Cheapest DocuSign plan | DocuSign / year | Per contract | Usign / year | Per contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | Personal | $132 | $5.28 | $2.50 | $0.10 |
| 50 | Personal | $132 | $2.64 | $5.00 | $0.10 |
| 100 | Standard, 1 seat | $360 | $3.60 | $10.00 | $0.10 |
| 250 | Standard, 3 seats | $1,080 | $4.32 | $25.00 | $0.10 |
| 500 | Standard, 5 seats | $1,800 | $3.60 | $50.00 | $0.10 |
| 1,000 | Standard, 10 seats | $3,600 | $3.60 | $100.00 | $0.10 |
| 3,000 | Standard, 30 seats | $10,800 | $3.60 | $300.00 | $0.10 |
DocuSign Personal is $11/user/month billed annually with 5 envelopes per month; Standard is $30/user/month billed annually with 100 envelopes per user per year. Figures from DocuSign's published pricing, 10 September 2026. Your quote may differ.
Why the per-contract shape wins
The price gap is a symptom. The cause is that seats and signatures measure different things, and only one of them is what you actually consume.
You stop buying capacity you don't use
A seat is a licence to send, priced whether or not anyone sends. An envelope allowance is capacity bought in blocks of a hundred. Sign 250 contracts and DocuSign's cheapest published route is three seats — three hundred envelopes, three licences, for one workflow. Usign bills 250 signed contracts and nothing else.
Everyone can send, because sending is free to authorise
With per-seat pricing, giving a fourth colleague the ability to send costs $360 a year, so companies ration it and contracts queue behind whoever holds a licence. Usign has no seats at all: add the whole team, add an agent, add a marketplace integration. You pay when a contract gets signed, which is the only moment value actually changed hands.
You are billed on outcomes, not attempts
Drafting is free and unlimited. Previewing is free. A contract that is sent and never signed costs nothing. That matters most in exactly the workflows that break seat pricing — campaigns, marketplaces, onboarding — where a healthy chunk of what you send was always going to go unsigned.
And an agent can drive all of it
One MCP connection, eleven annotated tools, up to 300 contracts from a single instruction, and a create-then-send split so a draft can never escape by accident. That is the part no amount of per-seat licensing buys you, and it is the reason Usign exists.
We compare published list prices, because that is the only basis a public comparison can be checked against. DocuSign quotes custom pricing above 50 users and does not publish its pay-as-you-go rate for envelopes beyond an allowance, so a negotiated agreement will differ from the table above.
Scope differs too, and it should inform which tool you buy: Usign issues simple electronic signatures with a PAdES baseline signature, a content hash and an embedded audit trail — documented precisely on our security page and in what makes a PDF court-ready. If your transaction requires a qualified signature under eIDAS, notarisation or in-person identity proofing, that is a different product category and you should buy for the requirement, not the price.
Run the first hundred on us
Free for life, not a trial month. Enough to find out whether the shape fits before anyone signs a purchase order.