Is DocuSign free? Yes, three times, and then it is $120 a year

Drop your document here and sign it now. PDF, Word and Excel all work: a .docx or .xlsx is laid out in your browser exactly as it was written, so there is nothing to convert first. Add a signature, a date, a company stamp or a watermark, then download it sealed. Free to start, no account, and the file is never uploaded to do it.

Is DocuSign free? There are three honest answers and the vendor only advertises one of them. There is a free DocuSign account, which signs a very small number of documents. There is a DocuSign free trial, which is the paid product with a clock on it. And there is the free thing almost nobody realises they already have: signing a document somebody else sent you costs nothing and always has. Here is exactly where each one ends, what happens to your bill when it does, and what to do at the moment it stops.

The free DocuSign account: three documents, then a wall

Sign up for a free DocuSign account and you get a small allowance of documents you can send for signature. It has been three for a long time, and it is three in total rather than three a month, which is the detail people miss. You do not get a fresh three in October. You get three, and then the send button starts asking for a card.

Inside that allowance you get the real product: the envelope, the recipient email, the signing page, the certificate of completion. That is worth knowing, because the free tier is not a crippled demo. It is a genuine sample of the thing, sized so that you hit the end of it during the exact week you were deciding whether to buy.

If your honest volume is one contract a quarter, take the three, use them, and then come back to this paragraph. The free DocuSign account is a perfectly good answer right up to the fourth document, and the fourth document is where this article starts being useful.

The DocuSign free trial: thirty days of the paid product

The DocuSign free trial is a different thing wearing the same word. It is normally thirty days of a paid tier, usually with a card required at signup or at the end, and it is designed to get a real workflow inside the product so that cancelling costs you a migration rather than a click.

Two things to do on day one of any e signature free trial, ours included. Send a real document, not a sample, because sample documents never have the awkward page that breaks a tool. And download the finished file and open it somewhere else, because what you get back is the only part of the product you keep after the trial ends.

Two things to do on day twenty five. Check what the plan renews at rather than what it advertised, and check whether the price you were shown was the annual-commitment price divided by twelve, which is how most vendors in this category quote. DocuSign pricing is quoted this way and so is nearly everyone else's.

DocuSign pricing after the free part, in plain numbers

DocuSign plans start with a personal tier at roughly $15 a month billed monthly, or roughly $10 a month if you commit to a year, which is about $120 a year and caps you at a small number of envelopes. Standard sits near $45 per user per month and Business Pro near $65 per user per month, both per user, both cheaper on an annual commitment.

The two words that decide your actual bill are "per user" and "envelope". Per user means a three person team pays three times whether or not the other two ever sign anything. An envelope is one send, containing however many documents and however many signers, and the allowance on the entry tier runs out faster than people expect because a document sent back for a correction is a second envelope.

DocuSign CLM, the contract lifecycle product, is a different purchase again and is quoted rather than listed. If somebody has told you DocuSign costs $10 a month and your team is four people sending revisions, the number you should plan for is closer to $2,000 a year.

The part that is genuinely free and always was

If somebody sends you a document to sign through DocuSign, signing it is free, forever, with no account and no card. You are the recipient, and recipients have never been the ones paying. The same is true here and at every serious vendor. Nobody in this market charges the person who was asked to sign.

So if you searched "docusign free" because a document landed in your inbox this morning, you are already done. The rest of this page is for the other person, the one doing the sending.

What we sell instead, and the arithmetic that makes it worth reading

We are a DocuSign alternative built for the volume where a subscription is bad arithmetic. Sign a PDF, a Word file or an Excel sheet in the browser, and pay $1.50 for the completed download. No account required to start, no envelope allowance, no card on file, no monthly line item in a quiet month.

Four documents a year on our per document price is $6. The same four on a DocuSign personal plan is about $120, because the plan bills in the eight months you send nothing. If you would rather have a plan, ours is $5 a month personal and $15 a month business, flat for the account rather than per user, with unlimited eSignatures on both.

What you get back is the part that matters after the trial ends. The signature is drawn into the page rather than laid on top as an annotation, so it survives being opened in something other than the browser that made it. Word files come back as Word and Excel files come back as Excel, which is the single most common complaint about every tool in this category. And every finished document carries a public verification page, so the person receiving it can confirm it is genuine without an account, a login or your word for it.

Switching without a migration project

There is nothing to migrate. Download the finished PDFs you already have out of DocuSign and keep them, because a completed document is a file and does not depend on the account that made it. Then send the next one somewhere else and compare the two results side by side.

The only thing worth checking before you move is whether anybody outside your company expects a DocuSign envelope specifically, which happens in enterprise procurement and almost nowhere else. If your counterparties are clients, tenants, contractors, patients or candidates, they care that the document arrived and that signing it took thirty seconds on a phone. They have never once cared whose logo was on the page.

Sign the fourth document now

Drop the PDF into the panel at the top of this page and it opens in the signer with your document loaded. Draw or type the signature, place it, download the finished file. If you like what comes out, it is $1.50, and if you do not, you have lost about a minute.

Questions people ask about this

Is DocuSign free?

Partly. A free DocuSign account signs three documents in total, not three a month, and then asks for payment. The DocuSign free trial is thirty days of a paid tier and usually wants a card. Signing a document somebody else sent you through DocuSign is free forever and needs no account.

How many documents can I sign on a free DocuSign account?

Three, and the count does not reset monthly. After that the free tier stops sending. If you need a fourth, either buy a plan or use a per document tool: ours is $1.50 for the completed download with no subscription.

How much does DocuSign cost after the free trial?

The personal tier is around $15 a month billed monthly or about $120 a year on an annual commitment, with a capped envelope allowance. Standard is around $45 per user per month and Business Pro around $65 per user per month. DocuSign CLM is quoted separately. Check DocuSign's own pricing page before you buy, because these tiers change and vary by country.

Is there a free DocuSign alternative?

Several, and they differ in where the limit sits rather than whether there is one. SignWell allows three documents a month, Xodo Sign (formerly eversign) allows five, DocuSeal is open source if you are willing to host it yourself. We charge $1.50 per completed document with no plan, which beats every subscription below roughly ten documents a month.

Do the people I send documents to have to pay?

No, not here and not at DocuSign. Recipients never pay in this market. If a tool ever asks the signer for a card, close it.

Can I get DocuSign gratis permanently?

Only as a recipient. As a sender the free tier is a sample, not a plan, and it is meant to run out. A permanently free way to send is either an open source tool you host yourself, or staying inside a competitor's monthly free allowance.

Make a signature free →

What PDF Verified is, and what it is not

PDF Verified is a tool for preparing, signing, stamping and checking documents. It is not a law firm, a compliance service or a forensic examiner, and nothing here is legal, financial or compliance advice. Requirements differ by country, by document type and by the party asking, so check what applies to your document before you rely on it, and take advice where the document matters. You are responsible for the documents you create, sign and send, and for having the authority to do so: signing or stamping in somebody else name, or as an organisation you do not represent, is forgery whatever tool is used. To the extent the law allows, we accept no liability for how a document made with this tool is used or relied on. The full position is in our terms of service.

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