Manual signing vs. wesign.now
A handwritten signature on a scan isn't worth more than a digital one.
Print, ink, scan, email — the workflow most teams still run. A scanned signature gets the same legal status as a typed name (Simple Electronic Signature). wesign.now ships the same legal tier, plus a tamper-evident PAdES seal, plus an RFC 3161 time stamp over the signed file, plus a full audit trail of who saw what when. Without the printer.
| Feature | wesign.nowOur platform | ManualAlternative |
|---|---|---|
| Tamper-evident | Cryptographic — one byte breaks it | Photoshop-evident |
| Independent time proof (RFC 3161) | available | not available |
| Audit trail (who, when, where, from which IP) | available | not available |
| Multi-signer routing | Automated | Email + thread |
| Branded signing page | YOURCOMPANY. | — |
| Step up to AES via SMS-verified identity | available | No — handwritten ≠ identity-bound |
| Storage + retention | Region-pinned, encrypted at rest | Whatever folder it lands in |
| Verifiability years later | PAdES-B seal, checkable in any PDF reader | Scan quality + paper trail |
| Legal class | SES; AES with an SMS code; no QES | SES (typically) |
| Time to a signed contract | Minutes | Hours-days |
| Carbon footprint | Zero paper | Per-doc |
| Cost | USD 10 / mo | Printer + ink + scanner + time |
| Present: share + track docs, capture leads | available | not available |
If the contract ever ends up in court, a scanned signature can be repudiated easily ('that's not my signature, that's just a JPEG'). A wesign.now PDF has cryptographic proof that the signer's session was real and the bytes haven't moved since. Same legal class — much stronger evidence.