Document signing and verification without platform lock-in

AIThis description was written by a model from public signals. The facts behind it are listed under Evidence.

Problem

Organizations and individuals need to digitally sign and verify documents, but existing platforms charge fees and create lock-in by requiring both signers and verifiers to use the same proprietary service or Adobe's trusted list.

Solution concept

A document signing system built on open standards and free infrastructure that decouples signing from verification. Signers and verifiers use the same tools and standards—neither party requires a proprietary account or subscription—and signatures are anchored in public, vendor-neutral infrastructure (certificate authorities, transparency logs, blockchain).

Who has it

Companies and individuals who sign, issue, and verify documents and contracts; software teams signing build artifacts and releases.

How they handle it today

Today they use proprietary document signing platforms like DocuSign, Google's tools, or Adobe services, which require subscription fees and lock users into the vendor's ecosystem for verification.

Why now

The success of Let's Encrypt in democratizing TLS certificates shows that free, standards-based public infrastructure can replace proprietary vendors; rising awareness of lock-in and data privacy concerns in SaaS; GitHub Actions and CI/CD integration of artifact signing is becoming standard practice.

How it could charge

Inference: Premium self-hosted deployments or support for organizations unwilling to use the free hosted service; API usage tiers for programmatic signing at scale; optional managed services for certificate authority or infrastructure hosting; custom domain signing or enterprise identity features.