DocuSign alternative in Australia: what 100 envelopes a year actually costs

The price comparison, with the sources

Two scenarios, because the answer changes with team size and almost every comparison table on the internet quietly ignores that. Scenario A is a sole practitioner sending 100 documents a month. Scenario B is a five-person practice sending the same 100 documents a month between them. A hundred documents a month is roughly one engagement letter, declaration or financial statement per working hour of a busy week — a realistic small-practice load, not a stress test.

Pricing checked on 7 September 2026. DocuSign figures from their Australian storefront, ecom.docusign.com/en-AU/plans-and-pricing/esignature, cited as plain text, not a link. Siggy figures render live from our own price list and change on this page the moment they change in the product.

What a cheaper price does not cost you

A price this far below the incumbent's invites one fair question: what has been left out. Here is the answer, in the form of things you can check rather than adjectives.

The record is built to be argued with

Every completed envelope comes back as a PAdES-sealed PDF — tamper-evident, so a later change to the file is detectable rather than a matter of opinion. With it comes a Certificate of Completion drawn from a hash-chained audit trail: every step of the signing recorded, each entry chained to the one before it, so the sequence cannot be quietly rewritten afterwards. That is the artefact you would put in front of a client, an insurer or a tribunal, and it is on every plan including the free one.

The legal basis is stated, not implied

Electronic signatures are recognised in Australia under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth), which requires that the method identifies the signer and indicates their intention, is as reliable as appropriate in the circumstances, and that the recipient consents. Siggy is built around those four conditions — an explicit consent step before signing, identification evidenced on the certificate, and a record that makes both demonstrable. We have written the whole thing up in plain English: are electronic signatures legally binding in Australia?

Access to the account is not the weak link

Two-factor authentication is compulsory on every Siggy account — not a setting a busy practice forgets to switch on. Where a specific document needs a second factor at the signing end, you can require an access code before it opens, and that step is evidenced on the Certificate of Completion. We handle personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), and this site runs no third-party trackers.

Onshore hosting, and what it does and does not settle

Siggy is Australian-owned and Australian-hosted: documents, audit trails and certificates stay in Australia. Worth saying plainly, because a lot of Australian vendors imply otherwise — DocuSign states it has "been operating in Australia for over a decade" and has "two data centres in Australia", so onshore hosting on its own does not separate the two products and we are not going to pretend it does. What it settles for us is who you are dealing with: Siggy is built and run by Ontology Analytics Pty Ltd, ABN 36 653 416 856, in the ACT, and support is answered in Australian business hours by the people who write the code. Detail on our trust page.

And if you send very little

The 100-per-user-per-year allowance only bites if you exceed it, so if you send six or seven documents a month the cap is not your problem and the sharp end of this page does not apply to you. The price still does. Our free plan is 5 envelopes a month with no card and no time limit, which is a cheaper way to find out whether the workflow suits you than a renewal notice is.

What actually breaks if you move

Nothing structural breaks. Siggy uses the same mental model as DocuSign — envelopes, recipients, fields, signing order, a certificate at the end — so anyone who has used DocuSign is productive in an afternoon, your clients still sign from a link in an email with no account, and there is a free plan to test it on real documents before you cancel anything.

What stays the same

• Your clients' experience. They get an email, click a link, sign on a phone or a laptop, and never create an account or set a password. That was already true on DocuSign and it stays true.
• The workflow. Upload a PDF, place fields, choose the signing order, send. Sequential or parallel routing, automatic reminders, expiry, decline, correction with a revision history.
• The output. A tamper-evidently sealed PDF and a Certificate of Completion recording every step of the signing, filed with the document.
• Your staff's habits. Siggy's interface is deliberately close to what your team already knows. Retraining a practice is not a project.

What you have to do once

• Rebuild your templates. Siggy cannot import DocuSign templates. Rebuilding one is uploading the PDF and dropping the fields back on, so a practice with five or six templates is looking at an afternoon, not a migration project. Do this before you cancel, not after.
• Let in-flight envelopes finish where they are. Anything already out for signature stays in DocuSign until it completes. Start new work in Siggy and let the tail run down.
• Download your completed documents and certificates from DocuSign before your access ends. Your signed history does not travel with you. This is the one genuinely irreversible step and the one most people forget, so put a date on it.
• Repoint any API integration. If you have a system calling DocuSign's API, that code has to be repointed at Siggy's API and webhooks, which are on the $20 Business plan and cover sending, tracking and status updates. Scope that work before you set a switch date rather than after.

Integrations, since you will ask. Xero and MYOB integrations are in build. Tell us which system your practice actually runs on and we will tell you where it sits in the build — send us the name and it goes straight to the people writing it. That is a genuinely useful thing to do even if you never switch: it is how the order gets decided.

What it costs you to try

Nothing. The free plan is 5 envelopes a month with no credit card. Send a real engagement letter through it, to a real client, and see whether the workflow argues for itself. Paid plans are billed monthly unless you choose annual billing for 20% off, and your documents are yours to download whenever you like.

The honest sequencing: run both for one month. Keep DocuSign until its term is up, send your new work through Siggy, and compare the two invoices when the renewal notice arrives. If we are wrong about your practice, you will have lost $15 finding out.