Most e-signature tools run into the same wall the moment you actually try to use them: either the paid plan is priced for a business signing hundreds of documents a month, or the "free" tier caps you at one or two documents and then asks for a card. On top of that, a lot of them expect the person you're sending the document to also create an account before they can sign - which is exactly the kind of friction that makes someone ignore your email for three days.
LoveByPDF's e-signature workflow fixes the second problem completely and keeps the first one honest: the person signing never needs to sign up for anything, and you get your first signature request free to see the whole thing work before you spend anything.
How it works
- Open Send for E-Signature and upload the PDF that needs a signature - an agreement, an offer letter, a vendor contract, a consent form, anything.
- Add the name and email of everyone who needs to sign it. If more than one person needs to sign, choose whether they should sign one at a time, in order (useful for approval chains - a manager signs, then it goes to the client) or all at once (when the order doesn't matter).
- Each recipient gets an email with their own private signing link. That's the entire "onboarding" they need - no password to set, no account to verify, nothing to install.
- They open the link, draw, type, or upload their signature, place it wherever it needs to go on the page, and submit. It's baked into the document immediately.
- If there's a next person to sign, they're emailed automatically the moment the previous person finishes. Once everyone's signed, you get an email and can download the fully-executed PDF from your own dashboard.
What it costs
Your first signature request is free - one document, one signer, the complete round trip, so you can see exactly how it works before deciding anything. After that it's a small number of credits per signer: a document going to one person costs a fraction of what a document going to five people does, because five signers genuinely is five times the work on our side. If you're on an unlimited plan, everyday signature requests are included.
The people signing are never charged and never asked for anything. Whoever sends the document pays for it - which is the only arrangement that makes sense, since the person signing didn't ask to be involved.
Why it isn't free forever, honestly
Every other tool on this site follows the same pattern: you upload a file, we process it, you download the result, and the file is deleted from our servers within minutes. Nothing lingers.
A signature request can't work that way. The whole point is that someone else, somewhere else, opens a link and signs - so the document has to sit on our servers, waiting, until they do. That's real storage holding real documents belonging to people who aren't even our users. Charging for it is what lets us keep the window short, delete promptly, and not quietly turn into a filing cabinet for other people's contracts.
The one-hour signing window
A signature request stays open for 60 minutes from the moment you send it. After that the links stop working, the document is deleted from our servers, and you're emailed to let you know.
That's deliberate, and it's the direct consequence of the paragraph above: a document nobody is actively signing shouldn't be sitting on someone else's server at all. In practice it means one thing for how you use this - send it when the people signing are actually available. Message them first, then send. Signing itself takes under a minute; the hour is for getting to it, not for remembering it exists.
If a request does expire, nothing is lost on your side - your original file is still on your own computer. Send it again when everyone's ready and the new links work straight away.
Why the signer doesn't need an account
The whole point of sending a document out for signature is that the other side is often not someone who already uses your tools - a new client, a landlord, a one-time vendor, a family member. Requiring them to create yet another account before they can sign something is exactly the kind of friction that turns a five-minute task into a week of follow-up emails. Each signing link here is its own long, unguessable web address - the same trust model as a password-reset email - so it works for anyone with a browser, on any device, with nothing to remember afterward.
You get a record of what happened
Every view, signature, and decline is logged with a timestamp against the request, and you can check progress, resend a link, or cancel the whole thing at any time from your dashboard. If someone declines, you're told immediately - along with their reason, if they gave one - and the request closes rather than leaving you waiting on a signature that isn't coming.
When to use this instead of the regular Sign PDF tool
If you're signing your own document yourself, the regular Sign PDF tool is the faster and cheaper path - upload, sign, download, done, with no waiting and no email involved. Reach for E-Signature Requests specifically when you need someone else to sign: especially more than one person, in a particular order, or someone who isn't already a user of the site.