Docusign API pricing stops at 100 envelopes a month
Docusign publishes prices for three developer API plans. The most expensive of them, Advanced, costs $720 a month billed monthly and includes 100 envelopes a month, which is 1,200 a year. Above that allowance the published price list ends: for the developer plans Docusign does not publish an overage rate or a way to buy an envelope past your allowance, and the tier above Advanced is a sales quote carrying a five-user minimum.
So if you are sizing an integration that sends more than a hundred documents a month, the published number will not tell you what you are going to pay.
Docusign’s published developer plans
| Plan | Per month, billed monthly | Per month, billed annually | Envelopes/month | Envelopes/year | Cost per envelope, billed monthly (computed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $75 | $50 | 40 | 480 | $1.88 |
| Intermediate | $450 | $300 | 100 | 1,200 | $4.50 |
| Advanced | $720 | $480 | 100 | 1,200 | $7.20 |
| Enhanced | Contact sales | Contact sales | Not published | — | — |
Source: Docusign’s Developer API plans and pricing page, checked 27 August 2026.
The last column is not Docusign’s. They publish no per-envelope figure anywhere on that page; those three numbers are the annual cost divided by the annual allowance, assuming you use every envelope you are entitled to. Send fewer and your real rate goes up.
Committing to a year takes exactly a third off all three tiers, and the page opens with the annual toggle already selected. That is worth knowing before you quote a colleague a price from memory, because the number most people carry away from that page is $50, $300 or $480, and none of those is what you pay unless you sign for twelve months. On the annual basis the per-envelope figures become $1.25, $3.00 and $4.80.
Intermediate and Advanced include the same 100 envelopes a month. The extra $270 a month between them buys a feature set, not sending capacity.
Docusign labels each allowance a “Starting amount”, which is accurate. Growing past it puts you on terms the page does not state.
The ladder ends at 1,200 envelopes a year
Advanced is the top of the published pricing and its allowance is 100 envelopes a month. There is no fourth published tier.
What happens on envelope 101 is not answered for these plans. The page’s developer-specific FAQ says only that developer plans are “priced based on API features as well as the volume of envelopes that can be sent through API calls”, and stops there. No overage rate for a developer plan appears on the page, and neither does a way to pre-purchase capacity against one. The page does answer the overage question for Docusign’s eSignature plans, which are the seat-priced product for people sending from the web app rather than through code, so a pay-as-you-go sentence found on that page is worth checking against the plan names it actually lists.
Enhanced, the tier above Advanced, is contact-sales with a five-user minimum. That minimum is the part worth noticing if you are a two-person shop with one integration to build: the cheapest quotable plan above the ladder is priced for five users before anyone has discussed envelopes.
Support has no row on the pricing table. The page’s FAQ says you can open a support case if you are working in a developer account or have purchased a plan, without differentiating support by tier or pricing it. Whatever support arrangement you end up with, you will not find its price on the page you are budgeting from.
None of this makes Docusign expensive by itself. Plenty of teams send fewer than 1,200 envelopes a year and will pay exactly what the table says. It does make the published price incomplete for everyone else, and that is a large group, because you generally do not write code against a signature API in order to send eight documents a month.
1,500 envelopes a year, priced out
An integration sending 1,500 envelopes a year is sending 125 a month. That is past every published allowance Docusign has.
| Docusign Advanced | Holosign Unlimited | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost, billed monthly | $8,640 | $228 |
| Envelopes included per year | 1,200 | Unlimited |
| Covers 1,500? | No, 300 short | Yes |
| Cost of the last 300 envelopes | Not published for developer plans | $0 |
| Cost per envelope at 1,500 | At least $5.76, plus an unpublished overage rate | $0.15 |
| Users included | Not stated on the developer plans page | Unlimited |
Both columns are month-to-month prices, which is the only way to compare them without flattering one side. Holosign Unlimited is $19 a month (€19), so $228 for the year, and the plan meters neither documents nor users. Across 1,500 envelopes that is a little over fifteen cents each. On a one-year Docusign commitment the same plan is $5,760, which works out to $3.84 an envelope and is still 300 envelopes short.
The Docusign column cannot be finished. Its floor is $8,640 divided by 1,500, which is $5.76, and the true figure is higher by whatever the 300 uncovered envelopes cost. That price is the one the page does not publish.
The gap between $228 and $8,640 is a factor of about 38. It compares annual list price at one send volume and nothing else: the feature sets are not equivalent, and the two products are not the same size.
We have two other posts on what Docusign costs, and both are about a different thing than this one. The real cost of Docusign for a 3-person team and Docusign is too expensive for what most small businesses actually need are about per-seat pricing for people sending documents from the web app. This page is about per-envelope pricing for sends made by your code. If you are comparing the products rather than the APIs, the Holosign vs Docusign comparison covers the plans side by side.
The Holosign API
You create a document (POST /api/v1/documents), list and fetch documents, download a completed PDF, send a document for signature, void one, list and fetch templates, and instantiate a document from a stored template with POST /api/v1/templates/{id}/documents. That is the whole surface: nine operations across eight paths. The last one exists so you do not have to rebuild a contract’s fields and signer roles on every call.
The upload ceilings are stated in bytes: 4MB for a direct multipart upload, or 50MB if you pass a file_url and let our server fetch the PDF itself. The specification sets no limit on how many pages that PDF contains.
The signature lifecycle is pushed to you as webhook events: document.sent, viewed, signed, completed, and voided. signed fires once per signer, so on a three-party contract you get three of them. completed fires once, when the last signer is done, and it is the only event carrying a SHA-256 hash of the finished document alongside the full signer roster, with an email address and a signing timestamp against each name. If you are reconciling signatures against your own records, that is the event to build on.
The API is available on every plan including Free. The specification says so in its own words: “Every action here is available to every account on every plan — document quota is the only metered difference between plans, and it is called out explicitly on the two endpoints it applies to.” There is no developer tier and no API add-on to buy. Free grants 5 documents a month with a single sender; Unlimited is $19 a month flat with unlimited documents and unlimited users. When you exhaust a Free plan’s quota the API returns 402 QUOTA_EXCEEDED, which is a metered send quota running out rather than a paid feature refusing you.
Rate limits are published per bucket: 600 reads a minute, 300 document creations, 500 template instantiations, and 60 voids. Sends are the exception, capped at 30 a minute and 500 a day. The send bucket also refuses a request when its own counter is unavailable, on the reasoning that you can retry a rejected send, whereas outbound email that escapes metering is gone. At 1,500 envelopes a year you are sending roughly four a day, so the daily cap is nowhere near your traffic, but it is the ceiling and you should know it exists before you design around a burst.
If you want the whole flow rather than a list of endpoints, the API quickstart walks from no key to a signed, downloaded PDF in six curl calls.
Questions to ask any e-signature vendor
Each of these separates a published price from a real one, and they are worth asking us as readily as anyone else.
How many envelopes are included per month, and is that a hard allowance or a starting point? Ask for the words, because “starting amount” and “included” are not the same commitment.
What happens on envelope 101? Every vendor has an answer. The useful question is whether it is a number or a phone call.
Is the overage rate published? If you have to be inside a billing screen or on a call to learn the price of the next unit, you cannot model your cost before you commit.
Does the quoted price assume an annual commitment? Developer pricing pages often open on the annual toggle, and the month-to-month figure can be half again as much.
Does the price change when you add a developer, or a second person who sends? Per-user pricing on an API plan is worth finding out about before you have three people on the team.
Is there a page limit on uploads, separate from a file size limit? A twelve-page MSA is ordinary and some products meter pages.
Does the completion webhook carry enough to reconcile against your own records? A document ID and a status is thin. A document hash and a full signer roster let you close the loop without a second API call.
FAQ
Does Docusign publish API pricing?
Yes, for three developer plans. Billed month to month they are Starter at $75, Intermediate at $450, and Advanced at $720 a month, checked on Docusign’s Developer API plans and pricing page on 27 August 2026. A one-year commitment takes a third off each. The published allowances stop at 100 envelopes a month, and for the developer plans the page does not publish an overage rate or a way to buy an envelope past your allowance. The tier above Advanced, Enhanced, is a sales quote with a five-user minimum.
Is there a free Docusign API tier?
There is a free developer account, but it is a test environment. Docusign’s developer plans and pricing page states that developer accounts “operate in a Docusign non-production (demo) environment”, that they “have most enterprise features enabled by default and don’t expire”, and that “envelopes sent through your developer account are not valid for legal purposes”. Going live requires purchasing a plan that allows Docusign API access (checked 27 August 2026).
Does Holosign charge extra for API access?
No. Every API action is available to every account on every plan, including Free; document quota is the only metered difference between plans. Free is $0 with 5 documents a month and a single sender. Unlimited is $19 a month (€19) flat, with unlimited documents and unlimited users, and no per-user fee.
Can I embed signing in my own app with Holosign?
Not today. Holosign emails each signer a link and they sign on a Holosign-hosted page. There is no API for rendering the signing experience inside your own interface.