❔ Digital Signatures
I've been searching all morning, trying to understand what it means to generate a digital signature (to e-sign a document). I have an internal portal for my organization, and I want to enable my users to electronically sign PDF documents. How do I faciliate generating a digital signature so no one can call into question that that user was the one who signed the document? Does digitally signing it mean if you were to open the PDF in Acrobat Reader, you'd be able to see proof that that person (with that email address) signed the document? If so, how do I make that happen?
11 Replies
Does your country have any widely used digital identity providers?
Alternatively, use a 3rd party service specifically for document signing - like DocuSign, Scrive, GetAccept
1. in the US
2. trying to do this myself because we don't have the budget to pay for one of those services
So, depending on what your requirements as to "signed" documents are, this will either be doable or insanely hard.
You 100% absolutely need a way for a user to prove their identity digitally however. I'd be suprised if there wasnt something like this in the US already.
The simplest form of signing something this way is that you begin a signing session with the digital identity provider, and they handle the rest. You then get a callbakc saying "it worked" and you can fetch the signature (which is probably just a really long chunk of bytes that can be verified by the provider if the user disputes the signature).
DocuSign or similar are more advanced and do not only this, but they also let you fill in forms on a PDF and generate an actual signature on that PDF, giving you a "signed" pdf, but they also store the digital signature in case of disputes
I've manually implemented the "simple" version for one of our products at work, and it wasn't super hard - the IDP does the heavy lifting
are there IDP's that do this for free? 🙂
I dont know what IDPs there are in the US
the swedish ones cost around 1 KR per signature, which is a ~10 cents
I just checked docusigns offers, since they are US based - they are ~120 to 300 bucks a year.
thats... not a lot of money
like, way less than developer salary to develop even the easy alternative 😄
isn't their pricing based on number of documents?
this is for non-profits: it's for 5 documents a month
the 300/yr deal allows for unlimited documents
But if your goal is to essentially re-create docusign, even a much simpler version of it, that will be a lot of work
I hear ya
Looks like nothing has happened here. I will mark this as stale and this post will be archived until there is new activity.