Send manually from a free dashboard
The cheapest setup that still produces a signed PDF with an audit trail is a free hosted tool you drive by hand: upload PDF, drop signature fields, email recipient. Documenso's free hosted tier is one example: $0, no credit card, 5 documents per month and up to 10 recipients per document (per documenso.com/pricing, verified May 6, 2026). The trade-off is no programmatic sending. Fine for occasional contracts, not for thousands of sends.
Self-host an open-source signing platform
If you have an engineering team and care about long-run unit cost, self-hosting is the cheapest route at volume. Documenso publishes its codebase on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license, so a Community Edition can be self-hosted at no software cost (AGPL source-disclosure obligations still apply); Documenso also sells a separate Self-Hosted Business Edition license for vendor support and advanced compliance, with a fair-use policy at documen.so/fair. What you actually pay for is the server, engineering effort, and ongoing compliance work (audit-trail design, plus certificate-authority tracking if you ever need EU eIDAS qualified signatures, which most US use cases do not).
Use a pay-as-you-go signing API
A signing API that bills only on completed packets is often cheaper than a subscription whenever your completion rate is below 100%, which it almost always is. The pricing model to look for: no monthly commitment, no per-seat charge for the sender, and a flat per-completion rate. Sending a request that no one finishes should not cost anything. Test the math against your typical volume and completion rate before you commit.
The big subscription platforms
DocuSign, Adobe Acrobat Sign, and Dropbox Sign each publish their own pricing pages. We are not quoting their numbers here because plans, envelope caps, and per-user thresholds change frequently and any number we cite would risk being out of date. If you are cross-shopping subscription against the routes above, fetch each vendor's current pricing page directly and run your own per-user, per-completion math.
A quick decision tree
- A few sends a month, no automation: free hosted dashboard tool, manual.
- Dozens to hundreds per month with low completion rates: pay-as-you-go API.
- Thousands per month with engineering capacity: self-host an open-source platform.
- Embedded white-label signing inside your own product UX: budget for a paid plan, and check whether the vendor bills per send, per completion, per user, or per envelope.
Anvil sits in the pay-as-you-go bucket: the free plan covers unlimited Etch e-sign packets sent from the dashboard or a shared link, and once you switch on API usage the meter is $1.50 per completed packet (sending unfinished requests is free, and adding a card adds 25 free packets per cycle), per useanvil.com/pricing (verified May 6, 2026). For embedded white-label signing, that lands you on the Product Pack tier instead. Run the per-completion math against your real volume; if completion is below 100%, this model usually wins.
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