CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.
One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.
Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.
You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.
The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.
And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.
To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.
You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.
Enjoy.
DocuSign Personal: $10 to $15 per month.
DocuSign Standard: $25 to $45 per user per month.
DocuSign Business Pro: $40 to $65 per user per month.
A 10-person team on Business Pro pays $4,800 to $7,800 a year. To put signatures on PDFs.
A team of 50 pays $24,000 to $39,000 a year.
And there is a 100-envelopes-per-year cap on most plans. Send more contracts and you pay extra.
Need SMS delivery? $0.40 per send.
Need ID verification? $2.50 per attempt.
Need premium support? $5,000 to $50,000 per year add-on.
You are rationing digital signatures in 2026.
DocuSign is a $10 billion company built entirely on this pricing model.
Now meet DocuSeal.
A free and open source alternative to DocuSign.
Created in 2023 by a Ruby developer named Alex who was simply trying to sign one document and realised every solution online was overpriced or required a subscription.
Three weeks later he had a working alternative. He pushed it to GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license.
Today it has 11,800+ stars and over 1,000 forks. Bootstrapped. No VCs. No paywalls.
Here is what DocuSeal does:
- Upload any PDF and turn it into a fillable, signable form
- Drag and drop signature fields, dates, checkboxes, file uploads, and 13 field types
- Send to multiple signers with custom signing order
- Automated email reminders
- Mobile signing on any device
- PDF signature verification built in
- Audit trail for every document
- Bulk send and templates
- Full API access
- Self-host with one Docker command
Here is what DocuSeal costs:
Zero. Forever. Unlimited documents. Unlimited signers. Unlimited storage.
DocuSign limits envelopes. DocuSeal doesn't.
DocuSign charges per SMS. DocuSeal doesn't.
DocuSign charges for ID checks. DocuSeal doesn't.
DocuSign sees your contracts on their servers. DocuSeal doesn't.
Here is the wildest part:
The median DocuSign contract per Vendr is $17,250 per year. One Reddit thread has people saying "they want me to pay $4.80 per e-signature."
Self-host DocuSeal on a $5 cloud server and a 50-person team can sign as many contracts as they want without paying a single dollar.
Your contracts never leave your server. Your client lists. Your NDAs. Your employment agreements. None of it touches a third-party company.
For individuals who only sign a few contracts a year, you save $180.
For small teams of 10, you save up to $7,800 a year.
For a 50-person company, you save up to $39,000 a year.
Your documents. Your signatures. Your server.
100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)
I don’t think enough people get this: oligarchs are going to automate most people out of a job and let them starve.
Nothing short of a revolution demanding that all people share in the productivity gains of AI and automation will save billions of us from death.
It’s that dire.
I enlisted to serve my country.
They called Muslims “sand n**gers”, “Hajis” and “Joe sh*t the ragman”.
They told us “we gotta fight them over there or we will have to fight them over here”, “they don’t value human life like we do”, and “they hate us because we are free”.
These were all lies. Dehumanizing propaganda designed to make it more palatable for the public to have our troops kill people by the thousands.
I saw my fellow service members die and maimed and kill innocents for these lies. I saw friends lose part of their soul when they took lives. I saw people haunted by screams. I saw veterans kill themselves over the anguish of what they had seen and done. 22 veteran suicides a day for decades. I saw our country’s international reputation destroyed and a trillion dollars wasted for these lies.
I’m still angry about it all these years later. This is why I have no tolerance for the same lies being pushed by the same people for another iteration of the same stupidity.
These wars of aggression do not serve our country.
I am anti war to the core. You will never change me on this.
🚨 Age verification isn’t protection, it’s surveillance.
Hackers recently found Persona collects 269 data points per user, scours gov & web sources for potential matches, stores them for years, and profiles users with risk scores.
Biometric honeypots: what could go wrong?
My government is trying to force software developers to implement age verification into operating systems.
In California, this becomes law in Jan 2027.
Maybe my calling in life is to help others break the law by keeping that code out of the operating systems.
It is not the place of our government to determine who gets access to any type of computing device.
Before Valentine's day, the W3C Credentials Community Group welcomed Scott Jones of Realeyes, who presented his company's system for proof of "humanity".
It was a great presentation, but a closed proof of humanity system is the last thing we want.
https://t.co/pOydP0pdPh
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
If you have AVG installed, be aware that it may install a browser and force it to be your default.
AVG just popped up the Windows settings and made their browser the default, undoing my own setting made just seconds before.
#CyberSecurity
When we talk about authoritarianism, it’s not just Donald Trump.
Musk owns X
Bezos owns Twitch
Zuckerberg owns Instagram and Facebook
Larry Ellison controls TikTok
Billionaires increasingly control what we see, hear and read.
Not everybody who supported Trump and MAGA was a bad person at the start. But MAGA is a jealous god. It demands its supporters descend a path of degeneration to utter moral ruin. Police death squads today; who knows what tomorrow.