How Signavos works: the complete guide to pay-per-signature e-signing

Signavos is an electronic-signature web app for people who sign documents occasionally. You upload a PDF, place the fields a signer must complete, and send a secure link. The recipient signs in the browser without an account. When they finish, you receive the completed PDF and a Certificate of Completion built from a tamper-evident audit trail.

The difference from DocuSign, PandaDoc, Dropbox Sign and the rest is the pricing model. They charge a monthly subscription, usually per user, whether you sign one document or a hundred. Signavos sells one-time credit packs. Sending a document costs 1 credit, which works out to from $0.50 per signature on the Regular pack. Nothing renews.

It is deliberately narrow. There are no templates, no bulk sending, no developer API and no third-party integrations today, and the web app sends to one recipient per document. If you need those, one of the subscription tools is the better buy — the comparison pages say exactly where the line is.

Electronic signing replaces the print–sign–scan loop with three things: a way for the signer to mark the document, a record of who did what and when, and a check that the document was not altered afterwards. Every serious e-signature service, including this one, is built around those three pieces.

1. 01Upload. You add a PDF (up to 40 MB). It is validated, scanned, hashed with SHA-256 and stored in private storage. The hash is the fingerprint every later check refers back to.
2. 02Prepare. You drag fields onto the pages: signature, initials, name, date, text and checkbox. Each field can be marked required. Preparing costs nothing; a draft can sit as long as you like.
3. 03Send. You enter the recipient’s name and email and send. 1 credit is debited at this moment — not before. Signavos emails the recipient a secure, encrypted link.
4. 04Sign. The recipient opens the link, reviews the document and completes the fields. They can draw a signature with a finger or mouse, type it (rendered in a script face) or upload an image. They can also decline and say why. They have 7 days.
5. 05Finalize. When the last required field is complete, the signature is stamped into the PDF, the audit chain is sealed, and a Certificate of Completion is generated. Both land in your in-app Inbox and on the document page.

That is the whole flow. There is no app to install on either side and no account for the signer. The step-by-step versions live under Learn, for example how to sign a PDF electronically and how to request a signature by email.

The product is built for senders who need a signed document a few times a month, not a few times an hour. The pattern is the same across them: a real legal document, a single counterparty, and no appetite for a recurring bill.

• Freelancers and consultants sending a contract, a statement of work or an NDA per client. See e-signature software for freelancers.
• Landlords with a handful of units: leases, renewals, addenda. See e-signature software for landlords.
• Small businesses that sign vendor agreements, offer letters and customer contracts without a dedicated legal or sales-ops team. See e-signature software for small businesses.
• Anyone who has been paying a monthly fee for a tool they open twice a quarter.

It is not designed for sales teams sending proposals at volume, for regulated workflows that require qualified electronic signatures, or for anyone who needs templates, an API or multi-party signing today. Those needs are real; they are just served better by a subscription product, and the comparison pages name which one.

A subscription is a bet that you will use the product enough to justify the fee. For occasional senders it is a bet you lose every month. At $12 per month, a tool you use twice costs $6 per document. At $20 per user per month across a three-person team, an unused seat is $240 a year.

Pay-per-signature inverts the bet. You buy a pack once, it sits in your wallet, and each send draws 1 credit. Your cost tracks your actual use exactly. The break-even against any subscription is simple arithmetic: divide the monthly price by the per-signature price. Against a $12 per month plan at $0.50 per signature, the subscription only wins once you send more than 24 documents every month, consistently.

The trade-off is honest too. Above that volume a flat fee is cheaper, and subscription tools bundle capabilities Signavos does not have. How much does e-signature software cost? walks through the math at 2, 10, 40 and 100 documents a month.

1 credit = one document sent to one recipient, start to finish. There is no separate charge for storage, for the certificate, for downloads, or for the recipient. Drafting, uploading and placing fields are free; the credit is debited only when you press send.

• Credits are valid for 12 months from purchase. Expiry is recorded in your ledger, so the balance you see is always the balance you have.
• If a request expires unsigned after 7 days, the credit is refunded to your wallet automatically.
• Packs are one-time purchases processed by Paddle, our merchant of record. Prices on the pricing section are shown in your local currency; the effective range today is $0.45 (Bulk) to $1.80 (Starter) per send. Refunds follow the refund policy.

No. The recipient never creates an account, sets a password or installs anything. They receive an email, open the secure link, review the document and sign. Possession of the emailed link is the authentication method, and it is recorded as such on the certificate.

• The link is encrypted and valid for 30 days, but the request itself expires after 7 days if unsigned.
• Once opened, a signing session lasts 60 minutes. Refreshing the link starts a new one.
• The recipient can decline with a reason. You are notified and the decline is written to the audit trail.
• After signing, the recipient can download their copy of the signed document from the same page.

Written for the person on the receiving end: how to sign a document without creating an account.

Until you delete them. There is no automatic purge and no retention cap tied to a plan. Completed documents, their certificates and the audit trail stay in your account and can be downloaded any time from the dashboard.

• Files live in private cloud storage. Nothing is reachable by URL guessing; every download is a short-lived signed link generated for you after a server-side authorization check.
• Deletion is explicit and confirmed. You get a 30-second undo window, after which the files are purged irreversibly. The audit records themselves are preserved, so the history of what was signed is never lost.
• Keep your own copy. Download the final PDF and the certificate and file them where you file the contract. The audit trail proves what happened; your copy is what you hand to a lawyer or a tenant.

Every meaningful event in a document’s life is written to an append-only audit log: created, sent, link opened, signature added, declined, completed, expired, voided. Each entry carries a UTC timestamp, the actor, the IP address and the browser user agent. Entries are hash-chained — each one includes the hash of the one before — so altering or removing any event breaks every hash after it.

When signing completes, the Certificate of Completion is generated from that chain, never from application logs. It lists the sender, the signer (name, email, authentication method), every event in sequence, the chain summary hash, and the SHA-256 checksum of the final PDF.

• Verify the document: hash the PDF you hold and compare it with the checksum on the certificate. A match proves the file is byte-for-byte what was sealed.
• Verify the chain: the document page in the dashboard has a verification panel that recomputes the entire chain and flags the exact sequence number of any break.
• What it does not do: Signavos does not embed a PKI digital-signature certificate in the PDF, does not use third-party timestamping and does not issue qualified electronic signatures. Its integrity evidence is the hash chain, the checksum and the certificate.

Deeper reading: what is an electronic signature audit trail? and what happens when an electronic signature is disputed?

The rule behind every control is the same: the server decides, the browser displays. No access is derived from a link, an ID or anything the client asserts.

• Private storage. PDFs are stored in a private bucket and served through signed URLs that expire in about 15 minutes. Guessing a path returns nothing.
• Separate secrets. The invitation link and the signing session are different secrets with different lifetimes. Leaking one does not grant the other.
• Secured sender accounts. Senders sign in with email and password (or Google), managed by Clerk with modern session security.
• Tenant isolation. Every document, field and audit row is scoped to its owning account at the database level; the application checks ownership again on every request.
• Hardening. Rate limiting on sensitive endpoints, security headers including a content-security policy, encrypted invitation tokens, and an append-only audit log.
• Honest scope. Signavos does not currently hold SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA attestations. If your organisation requires one, a certified vendor is the right choice.

This is general information, not legal advice. Rules vary by jurisdiction and document type.

In the United States, the ESIGN Act (2000) and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act give electronic signatures the same legal effect as ink for most transactions. In the EU and UK, eIDAS defines three levels: simple, advanced and qualified electronic signatures. Most everyday business signing — leases, freelance contracts, NDAs, approvals — uses simple electronic signatures supported by evidence.

Signavos provides simple electronic signatures backed by an audit trail. When a signature is questioned, courts generally look for four things: the signer’s intent to sign, their consent to do business electronically, a reliable association between the signature and the record, and an integrity-preserving record you can produce later. The audit certificate is designed to document each of those.

Some documents are commonly excluded from electronic signing or carry extra formalities — wills, certain family-law documents, court orders and some statutory notices, depending on where you are. If you are unsure whether your document qualifies, ask a lawyer before you send. More in are electronic signatures legally binding? and electronic signatures vs digital signatures.

PDF only, up to 40 MB per document. The file is checked by its actual bytes on the server, not by its extension, then scanned and hashed. Password-protected or malformed PDFs are rejected with a specific reason so you can fix and retry.

Word documents, images and scans need to be exported or converted to PDF first. Every modern word processor, phone camera app and operating system can do this natively. Merge attachments into a single PDF before uploading; one document is one PDF.

The workflow has one path: draft → send → signed (or declined / expired / voided) → completed. You can void a sent document before it is signed, resend the invitation, and watch every status change on the document page. AI agents can drive the same workflow through the MCP endpoint, where the multi-recipient limit already applies.