When a company starts thinking about implementing electronic signing, the first question is usually very direct: “How much will this cost us?”
TL;DR:
E-signing is not just about the subscription price. It is also about the cost of paper, printing, mailing, manual status checks, reminding signers, delays, and errors — costs you are already paying today. BetrSign offers a predictable per-user pricing model with unlimited sent documents, signatures, and templates. That means e-signing costs between €10 and €25 per user per month, while manually signing 200 documents can cost a company more than €2,000 per year in paper and employee time alone.
“How much will it cost?” is a fair question. Every new business solution brings a new expense, a new subscription, a new line item that takes money out of the budget available for the business year. But perhaps the better question would be: “How much will it cost us if we do not introduce e-signing into our business?”
If you prepare a contract in an office program, print it, sign it, send it by mail, wait for the signature, check in with the signer in the meantime, send reminders, save the signed contract once you receive it, scan it, and archive it, then you probably already know very well that the costs do not begin with subscribing to an e-signing service.
You have already been paying those costs for a long time — and they are not small:
the cost of paper,
the cost of cartridges and toner,
postage,
the cost of employee time .
Then there are potential errors, delays in closing agreements, and bottlenecks in completing deals.
The subscription is only the most obvious cost — the one you notice immediately: this many euros per user per month, this many euros per year, this many documents, this many signatures, this many additional features.
But with e-signing, you need to look at the bigger picture and consider at least three types of costs:
The cheapest solution on paper may not be the cheapest in practice. And the reverse is also true: a solution with a transparent monthly subscription can be significantly less expensive than traditional manual document processing — a cost companies often do not measure at all.
BetrSign has a simple, highly predictable pricing model: the subscription is charged per user and includes unlimited sent documents, signatures, and templates. That matters because the cost does not increase with every additional document you send for signing.
With the Basic plan , you will pay €10 per user per month, or €96 per year. It is especially suitable for low-risk documents, such as internal documentation, consent forms, non-disclosure agreements, and some basic HR documents.
The Advanced plan costs €15 per user per month, or €144 per year. It covers your need for signer identity verification and provides a higher level of trust and security for medium-risk transactions, employment contracts, sales agreements, and purchase orders.
The Premium plan costs €25 per month, or €240 per year, for a user who needs to sign documents with a qualified signature using a personal digital certificate to ensure the highest level of legal security. It is intended for high-risk documents in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and similar industries.
For companies whose needs go beyond the plans listed above, a Custom package is also available.
In practice, this means a company can predict costs with great accuracy. If it subscribes to the Advanced plan for five users, the basic cost is 5 × €12 per month, or €60 per month excluding VAT, with annual billing. Whether those five users send 50, 500, or 5,000 documents, the subscription will not change based on the number of documents sent.
This pricing model is much more transparent and predictable than that of some other providers, which justify prices by document volume while charging separately for additional documents, transactions, or signatures.
A company needs to know what it will be paying throughout the year — or next month.
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SaaS companies often offer monthly or annual payment options for their solutions and services. An annual subscription does represent a somewhat larger one-time payment, but when you divide it by 12, the monthly cost is usually significantly lower than with a monthly subscription.
A monthly subscription makes sense when you are testing the e-signing service, when you do not yet know exactly how many users will actually use it, or when you first want to see how electronic signing will fit into your existing processes.
An annual subscription makes more sense once it is clear that e-signing will become part of your regular business operations.
When deciding between an annual and a monthly subscription, you need to know whether you see e-signing as an occasional new tool or as a permanent part of your business process.
If you sign contracts and other documents weekly, e-signing is certainly not an “add-on” for you. It is an important part of your business infrastructure.
If you prepare and send 200 documents for signing every month, you have to prepare and align each document to its final version every single time. Then you print it and send it. You wait for a while, and if nothing happens, you check where it got stuck. You politely remind the signer(s) to send you the signed document. Once you receive it and check it, you store it in a folder and a cabinet — assuming everything is fine with the document. Otherwise, you may have to “repeat the exercise.”
Let’s say the manual part of the process takes only 10 minutes per document. That’s 2,000 minutes per month, or more than 33 hours of work. At an internal hourly rate of €20, that equals €660 per month.
And that is only administrative time, which could be spent much more wisely.
Now, let’s say the average document has 5 pages and needs to be printed at least twice, one copy for each party agreeing. That means at least 10 printed pages per document. With 200 documents per month, that’s 2,000 printed pages per month, or 24,000 pages per year — approximately 48 packs of office paper with 500 sheets each.
If we roughly assume that one pack of office paper costs around €5, paper alone at this volume costs about €240 per year.
And this does not even include incorrect printouts, revisions, reprinted versions, additional attachments, documents with multiple signers, internal copies, or archive copies.
But paper is still not the most expensive part of paperwork .
If we estimate printing costs very conservatively, for example, at 5 cents per page, then 24,000 printed pages add another €1,200 per year.
Altogether, a company with only 200 documents per month can spend more than €2,000 per year just on paper, printing, and manual work.
And then there are envelopes, postage, scanning, archiving, physical storage space, lost time, and the cost of errors.
Let’s take a hypothetical example: a company subscribes to BetrSign for 5 users who, together, send 300 documents for signing each month.
The company chooses the Advanced plan and pays for an annual subscription: 5 × €144 = €720.
Based on the calculations above, if each document took just 10 minutes of manual work, that would be 50 hours per month. At €20 per hour, that is €1,000 per month in working time alone.
The company printed 6,000 pages, which cost €360: €60 for 12 packs of office paper and €300 for printing. Altogether, that comes to €16,320 per year — or, put another way, 22.7 annual BetrSign subscriptions.
We all know the saying: Time is money . In business, this is especially true:
A sales agreement that waits too long for a signature means later execution — if it happens at all.
An employment contract lost in administration creates a poor candidate experience, which may prompt them to reconsider your offer.
An annex signed too late can stop a project.
A purchase order circulating by email holds up procurement.
E-signing not only saves time for people dealing with paperwork but also reduces the risk of errors. It can significantly speed up the start of the agreement’s execution.
A faster signature means:
a faster project start,
a faster order,
a faster hire,
faster fulfillment of obligations,
faster invoicing — and payment.
A delay in closing a deal can create a cost that many companies may not measure, but they certainly feel. Those delays are already affected by many factors you cannot fully control, so do’nt extend them further at the signing stage.
Although the signature is often one of the final steps before a deal, it has a strong impact on your company's first impression.
If your partners or clients first have to print the document you sent them by email, sign it, scan it, and send it back — or at least sign, scan, and send it back if you sent it by regular “snail mail” — you have essentially shifted an additional administrative burden onto them.
If you put yourself in their shoes, you will probably agree that the ability to sign your document electronically, anywhere and anytime, gives them a way better user experience.
The cost of a poor user experience is hard to enter into an Excel spreadsheet, but it is easy to notice.
When choosing between BetrSign plans, do not ask only which one is the cheapest. Ask what kinds of documents you regularly send for signing.
For low-risk documents, such as internal consents, basic NDAs, confirmations, and simple HR documentation, the Basic plan is sufficient.
For sales agreements, employment contracts, purchase orders, and documents where signer identification matters, choose the Advanced plan.
If you frequently deal with higher-risk documents, operate in strictly regulated sectors, or need signing with a personal digital certificate, choose the Premium plan.
The criterion for choosing the right plan should therefore not be price alone, but your documents, your business processes, and the risks associated with them. Not too low, because you need to ensure enough legal security. And not too high, because you may unnecessarily complicate the user experience.
We can assure you that you are not paying only for a software service. You are paying for faster business processes, better traceability and predictability, and a better user experience. Above all, you are paying to reduce manual work and errors, and to prevent administrative processes from getting stuck. You are also paying to save.
We hope we have successfully answered both questions: “How much will e-signing cost me?” and “How much does it cost me if I do not introduce e-signing?”
Before making a final decision, you can try BetrSign free for 30 days — the full Premium, without entering any credit card information — and use real examples from your own business to see what benefits e-signing can actually bring you.
If you get stuck anywhere or have a specific question, book a demo with one of our experts.
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