Many software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products have used e-signatures for years for things like leases, offer letters, and vendor agreements. In the past, SaaS products would redirect users to another site to provide their e-signatures. Today, signing has become a built-in feature of modern SaaS products using an embedded e-signature API rather than a separate tool.
The speed and efficiency of embedded e-signatures are revolutionizing multiple industries. Users no longer need to leave their software applications when they are signing leases, accepting offer letters from HR departments, or vendor agreements from B2B platforms.
The Build vs. Buy Problem
Building software products with in-house e-signature capabilities normally takes weeks of engineering time and brings legal and compliance work. The signing workflow usually requires audit trails, signer authentication, document storage, event handling, and numerous legal considerations (depending on the market).
For instance, let’s say you have an American SaaS company that wants to serve customers in the United States and across Europe. Not only would they have to follow the legal frameworks of the U.S. ESIGN Act and UETA, but they would also have to follow the European Union e-signature framework known as the eIDAS Regulation (EU No 910/2014).
Most SaaS development teams don’t find it productive to spend the time and resources on building SaaS programs with such complex e-signature systems in them. Instead, it is much more convenient and efficient to buy and integrate an existing e-signature API that allows them to focus more on the aspects of the core application and less on establishing the e-signature infrastructure. That is why most teams buy it.
Why Seat-based Pricing Doesn’t Fit SaaS
SaaS companies have historically used a seat-based pricing model to charge customers that use their products. A seat-based pricing model charges based on the number of people who access the signing platform, which are referred to as “seats.” All these seats represent the users within the same organization, which is called the tenant.
Many SaaS products use a multi-tenant system, where multiple tenants share the same infrastructure and resources for a lower cost to use them. However, seat-based e-signature plans don’t fit with multi-tenant SaaS products anymore because some tenants and their users have much higher signing volumes than others. Why pay a higher price for seats if your company doesn’t plan to send a high volume of documents each month?
For this reason, multi-tenant SaaS products with unpredictable volume per customer are ditching the seat-based pricing model and turning to the usage-based pricing model. The great thing about the usage-based pricing model is that it uses pay-as-you-go pricing, where a customer only pays per envelope of documents sent to someone for their signature. Paying per envelope ends up being significantly cheaper than paying per seat.
What an Embedded E-signature API should Include
Adding e-signature functionality to a SaaS product requires more than merely displaying a signature box. You must have an embedded signature API with the necessary features and capabilities built into it to accommodate the customer experience that you want to provide. These features and capabilities include the following:
- Embedded Signing Capabilities – Allows users to complete the signing process without being redirected to another third-party application.
- Embeddable Template Editor – Allows customers to create or customize their documents before sending them for an e-signature.
- Customer Workspaces – Each customer should have an individual workspace with their own custom templates, credentials, and documents.
- White-labeling – Creates unique branding to match a company’s SaaS product branding.
- Webhooks – Allow the SaaS product to respond to signing event activities in real time, such as someone viewing or signing the document.
How Firma.dev Approaches It
Firma.dev has taken the approach of building the cheapest e-signature API for developers who want to integrate signing capabilities into their own SaaS products. Its embedded e-signature API offers essential embedded components, such as an embeddable template editor and embedded signing, ensuring users never need to leave the host application to complete a signature.
Each customer gets an isolated workspace environment with its own templates, documents, and API keys. There is no additional cost for white-labeling, which gives customers the freedom to brand their e-signature system around their own product’s brand. Webhooks, such as real-time events for viewed, signed, and completed documents, are also supported.
Firma.dev operates under the usage-pricing model, charging approximately €0.049 per envelope (about 5¢ USD). For example, 100 envelopes cost €4.90, 1,000 envelopes cost €49, and 10,000 envelopes cost €490. The first envelope can be signed in under 10 minutes, with integration taking hours rather than weeks. Customers have access to versioned OpenAPI specs, with Firma.dev documentation available in English, Spanish, and French.
The Firma.dev embeddable e-signature API is legally valid in more than 55 countries and designed to support the ESIGN Act, UETA, eIDAS (simple and advanced electronic signatures, SES and AdES), UK eIDAS, and GDPR. There are no monthly minimums, no contracts, and no per-seat fees to worry about.
Integration Example: n8n
An n8n e-signature integration offers another way for SaaS teams to automate signing workflows without building every connection themselves.
Firma.dev has a dedicated n8n community node (n8n-nodes-firma) with 83 operations, built-in credential handling, and pagination. Alternatively, SaaS teams can connect through n8n’s standard HTTP Request node if they’d rather not install community nodes. n8n also has a trigger node that automatically registers and removes webhooks when a workflow is turned on or off, and can even react to events as they occur, such as a completed signing request.
The Firma.dev node works as a tool for n8n’s AI Agent, so an agent can pick a template and send a signing request based on a conversation.
Example Workflows:
- A deal moves to a new stage in Pipedrive, which automatically sends a contract for signature.
- A document is signed, and the signed copy is saved to Google Drive and the CRM is updated.
Example Use Cases
- Property managers, landlords, and tenants can complete lease agreement workflows without leaving a property management application.
- HR recruiting platforms can incorporate offer letters and employment applications into existing job candidate workflows.
- B2B marketplaces can add agreements and contracts for transactions between buyers and sellers.
- Vertical SaaS (industry-specific applications) can integrate signing requirements into workflows where documents are already an important part of their customer experience.
Conclusion
Do you have a SaaS team considering various e-signature implementation options for its products? If you’ve already overcome the build versus buy decision, the final step is to find the right embeddable API for your SaaS products. Well, you now know that an API with embedded signing, an embeddable template editor, per-customer workspaces, white-labeling, and webhooks is potentially worthy of your products.
Would you like to try Firma.dev to see if it lives up to these expectations? Firma.dev offers a free testing mode with real documents for potential customers who want to try out the API first. No credit card is required for free testing.
