eversign Review — Go Paperless With eSign!

Whether you’re a freelancer, an employer, or an employee, you must have to go through paperwork to keep the trail of all activities. It’s crucial to do the paperwork for many legal reasons and to be on a safe side. Otherwise, you might end up in hot water.

If you do paperwork, like I used to do, you can imagine the responsibility and frustration which comes with it. You have to manage time to schedule meetings with people and get your documents signed. Eventually, you end up managing all of those documents. And sometimes, it’s quite frustrating to find the right document on time.

The thing is you can’t just avoid this, and you’ve to have a record, so you don’t get in trouble. And with the evolution of technology, almost everything has made a digital presence in one way or the other. Same is the case with the legal documentation and contracts. And it’s been a huge relief for me ever since I got to introduce this space by a fellow developer. 💯

Now for all of my contracts and other legal documentation, I use an online service called eversign. I have been using it for a long time now, and I could not be happier. It saves my time and boosts efficiency.

Today, I have decided to write in detail about what features eversign has to offer and how you can implement it in your workflow. For this purpose, I will be setting up a new account and show you how you can get your first document signed online. So, let’s dive in!

🔥 eversign 

Founded in 2017, eversign is a SaaS product developed by apilayer. apilayer is a big name behind many popular & helpful APIs and SaaS products for developers. It was founded back in 2015 and have its office in Vienna, Austria. During this short span, they managed to build a solid product line and a good name.

Their products primarily focus on enabling the developers to improve their workflow and focus on doing the actual work. A fun fact about apilayer developers is that they kinda love lowercase letters. All of their products are named in lowercase like invoicely, eversign, and apilayer itself. 🙈

Most of their products are APIs, and two of them are SaaS products including eversign. A few of their products worth checking are listed below:

• 🤑 currencylayer API – Reliable Exchange Rates & Currency Conversion for your Business.
• 📪 mailboxlayer API – Email Validation & Verification.
• 👾 giflayer API – Powerful Video to GIF Conversion.
• 🗺 streetlayer API – Real-time, International Address Validation & Autocomplete.
• 🔖 invoicely (SaaS) – A Powerful Invoicing Platform.

Recently, we covered an extensive review for yet another amazing product by apilayer called the ipstack. This intuitive API helps you to geolocate and identify your website visitors. You can check out its features and working here →.

They store all the documents on AWS Cloud and store the data indefinitely for legal reasons. All the data is secured via 256-bit SSL encryption. You can always export your documents and remove all the data permanently from the servers.

Also, it rocks other useful features like team management, contacts management, electronic signatures, a document editor, and much more. I’ll be covering more in detail later in this review.

🤑 Pricing

eversign offers one free and three premium plans for its customers. The Basic plans start at $9.99 per month, and it goes up to Professional Plus at $79.99 per month. With each plan, you get almost all the features except a few. For example, there’s no Custom Branding in the Professional Plan, and there’s no In-Person Signing feature with the basic plan.

Apart from these, you have all features like templates, API documents, team members, integration, and premium support in all of them. They only vary regarding the quantity in each plan. And if you signup for a yearly membership, you’re going to get a 20% discount.

I like the idea of all the features in different options is quite promising. You can purchase a plan according to your usage instead of features. Also, for more needs, you can always contact them for a custom plan. There’s a free plan as well which you can try out to get an idea before making a purchase. 🤞

🎯 Getting Started With eversign

eversign rocks a clean and robust user interface combined with great user experience. Which makes the onboarding process an easy job. Follow the quick steps below to get up and running with it.

→ Step #1

The very first step is to head to the pricing page, choose a plan, and purchase it. The signup process is a little different than usual ones. It’s a three-step process where apart from credentials, they ask for your details and business. As an individual, you can also skip the business part.

→ Step #2

After completing the registration, you’re all set to get your first document signed electronically. Log in to your account; it will take you to the dashboard of eversign. In the dashboard, you can see the overview of your account, all the documents signed/pending, and manage your signatures. It should look like something below.

On the left sidebar, you have different tabs related to different features of eversign. Which kind of make sense and makes it easy to understand & use. So, to create your first document, navigate to the documents tab. That’s the place where you manage all of your documents — drafts, in the process, completed, and the one you needed to sign.

To create a new document, click on the New Document button on the top left corner. It will take to the next page where you can add all the content you want and prepare it to send to your customer.

→ Step #3

This is the main step where you have got to add everything about your document. You need to add the signers, link the document, and CC as many people as you want. There are a couple of things to consider at this point, so let’s break it down.

The very first thing is to specify the people who are going to sign it. By default, it’s only me, which doesn’t make any sense to me though. However, it’s on the very top, and you have the following three options:

• 🙈Only me
• 🤝 Me & Others
• 👬 Others Only

👉 Me & Other is one of the options you might be using a lot. However, if you’re a legal advisor or a third party who handle such stuff for other people, you can go for Others Only. It’s another interesting use case by the way. For now, go for Me & Others and proceed ahead.

After this, you need to upload the document to be signed. You can either upload or import one from Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, or Cloud Drive. Then add the signers or CC, add any message if you want to, and then click on Prepare.

→ Step #4

Once you’re done preparing your document, it takes you to the document editor. Here you can sign the document on your behalf, add custom fields, and add a place for other signers. Once you’re done hit the Send button, and you’re all set.

All the people that you have added in CC and the signers will receive an email. If you’re a CC, it’s read-only for you. While the signers can sign the document right away without signing up for an account. Which is cool, I guess. As they don’t have to go through the trouble of signing up for the sake of just signing it.

That’s it! Just 4 simple steps and you have legally signed a document successfully. 💯

🎖️  Features

As you have seen, it is quite easy to get started with eversign. Now let’s move onto the other features which will find helpful while using it. Let’s jump in!

📜 Templates

While preparing a document you might have noticed that there is an editor available as well. Using the editor, you can add custom fields, attach files — which is a huge plus, add text, and do some other cool stuff. So what you can do is prepare templates for repetitive tasks like the hourly contract, NDAs, or any other stuff.

Once you have templates ready, you can use them to save your time in the future. Just edit small fields and send them within a couple of seconds. I personally have a set of templates which I use quite often. And even for templates you can import them from any place, maybe right a doc and upload it.

🚦 Dashboard

I find the eversign dashboard to be very well-thought, clean, and robust. It does a great job of providing a good user experience. You can find almost everything in a click or two. All of the major features are listed in the left sidebar. While the main page shows your signature, summary of documents, recent activities, and drafts as well. 👌

On the top-left, you have a list of quick actions to get things done quickly. Another productivity tip is, when you hover over the sidebar items, they show a + sign to add a new item directly. Try it, and you’ll end up being more efficient. 😉

 🔗 Contacts

Contacts feature allows you to save your contacts for the future use. You can manage all of your contacts under the contacts tab. Once a contact is saved, the next time you start typing the contact, it will automatically show the drop down for you. So, again a feature to boost your productivity in the long run! 🤞

📖 Support & Documentation

A secret behind many successful products is their support team and documentation. Great documentation saves the user from the hassle of sending emails back and forth. And a good support team help you figure out things easily, listen to your feedback, and improve.

Talking about their support, once I’d a query regarding their data storage policy and privacy. So, I dropped them an email and got a response in less than 24 hours. Which is quite good considering the different time zones around the globe. And that’s not for once it’s the case most of the time. So, thumbs up! 👍

If you consider the documentation, you’ll find in-depth information about regarding almost all the topics. Also, there are video tutorials in the documentation to get different things done. I remember skimming through the whole documentation while getting started and it proved to be a great help. ⚡

📝 Electronic Signature

eversign generates signatures automatically for you based on your name and initials. There are also other ways you can do your signatures. All of them are listed below:

• ⚡️ Automatically generated signatures
• 🔺 Upload your signatures
• 🎨 Draw your signatures

If you consider the last option, you might find it useful in many situations. Using a tablet or an iPad with a digital pen, you can get the signatures as you usually do. Little productive hack for your organization. 🙈

🔰 Businesses & Team

Another interesting feature of eversign is that it lets you manage multiple business and complete team on it. You can add the team members to give access at different levels to share all the stuff. There are in total four access level:

• 🌟 Super Admin: Complete business level access except deleting business.
• 💂 Manager: Managerial level access to all businesses except deleting global templates and docs.
• 👷 Staff: Can manage only their documents and can use global templates.
• 👁 Read-Only: Can only view all documents and templates.

🤝 GDPR & HIPAA Compliance

eversign comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to make sure your data is protected, and you’ve control over how your data is used. And again, you can always remove your data permanently by deleting your account. Also, eversign is HIPAA compliant and provide a workflow to work in a HIPAA compliant way.

🔌 RESTful API

Last but not least an interesting feature for the developers is that eversign also provides a RESTful API. You can use the API to integrate eversign in your applications. It’s JSON based and is properly documented. There’s no free version; you’ve to purchase to use the API.

🍩 Wrap Up

eversign is a feature-rich product with strict legal compliance to help you go paperless. Tools like templates, editor, and team management help you save time and boost productivity. I consider eSign to be a crucial part of my workflow and rely on it on a day to day basis.

So, if you are looking to effectively manage all of your documents and put your efforts into what matters, you should give eversign a shot. It worths your time and investment.

Have you ever used eversign or any other eSign service? How was your experience? Let’s know your thoughts in the comments below.

Peace! ✌️