E-signatures for agencies: contracts and change orders

What agencies get signed

An agency's paperwork runs in two directions, to clients and to the people it hires:

• Client agreements and retainers: the master terms, the monthly scope and fee, and how extra hours are billed.
• Statements of work: one per campaign, site or product release.
• Change orders: extra deliverables, new deadlines or a bigger media plan, approved before the work starts.
• Creative and deliverable sign-offs: the client's approval of final artwork, a copy deck, a storyboard or a site ready to launch.
• Freelancer and subcontractor agreements, with an NDA before you share a client's brief.

Each one is a PDF of up to 8 MB that you send for signature. A document can have up to 20 signers, so the client's marketing lead, their procurement contact and your agency director can all sign the same one.

Sign-offs that end revision loops

Approvals cause disputes of their own: the client signed off on the final creative, then asks for another round at no charge, or says the version that went live was never approved.

Make the approval a signed document. Export the final proof as a PDF, add a short sign-off page ("Approved for production, round 2 of 2"), and send it to the client's approver. Their passkey, a cryptographic key only they control, unlocked with Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello or the device PIN, signs a statement that names the file's fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash, a short code calculated from the file's contents) and the time. A revised file has a different fingerprint, so the signed copy shows exactly which version was approved, and when.

The contract still decides what a new round costs. The signed sign-off records the facts it depends on: what was approved, by whom and when.

Change orders in the middle of a campaign

Scope grows quickly once a campaign is live. Send each change as its own document, and write the statement of work's verification code (ATT-XXXX-XXXX) into it, as client contracts and statements of work explains. Set Expires (optional) so a stale quote can't be signed weeks later; if it passes, the change order closes and every party is emailed.

When a client questions an invoice, send the signed change order. Their finance team can check it for free at attest.datahubz.com/verify, or with the open-source verifier attached inside the PDF, which runs in any browser even if Attest is gone and checks each signer's passkey signature, the original document, the pages you see and Attest's anchored record on Horizen, a public blockchain. Change one byte of the document, of any signer's entries or of the signed pages, and verification fails.

Keep unreleased client work private

Agencies hold their clients' secrets: launch dates, product names under embargo, pricing, media budgets. Most e-signature services describe encryption in transit and at rest, and describe no end-to-end mechanism, so their systems can decrypt the documents they store. We compared 21 e-signature services in October 2026, Attest and 20 others, and Attest was the only one that end-to-end encrypts every document, for every signer, by default.

Attest encrypts each document in your browser before upload, and only its parties can open it, in their own browsers. Attest stores it only as ciphertext it can't read. What signers fill in, such as their signature, name and date, is encrypted in their browser too.

Two habits keep the rest private:

• Titles without secrets. Attest sees the information around a document: its title, file name, size and type, your note, the email addresses of your account and of the signers, the signers' names, where fields are placed and when each step happened. Call it "Change order 7", not the product you are launching.
• Private certificates. By default an agreement's certificate is public: anyone with its link, code or the document's fingerprint sees the title, the file name, the verification code, the fingerprints of the document, the signed copy and the signed state, each signer's name and signing time, the blockchain anchor and each signature's evidence. It never shows the document, and it shows signers' email addresses only to the parties. Choose Private when you send, or Make private later, and only the parties see it.

Several people sending

Each person who sends documents uses their own Attest account and signing key, so each invitation names the account manager who sent it.

• Signing plan: $5 a month per account, for 20 documents a month.
• Pro: $49 a month for a heavy sender. Documents sent on Pro count as records, with 10,000 records a month and no separate document limit, and Pro adds every other Attest tool and the API.
• Organization plan: the organization's owners invite members by email, its plan covers every member who joins, and each member gets the better of their own plan and the organization's. Organization plans are arranged with DataHubz.

Each sender's dashboard sorts their documents into Action needed, Waiting on others, Completed, Drafts and All, with each document's signers, steps and Activity: every step with its time, in the sender's time zone. (The audit trail inside the signed copy is a separate record, in UTC, up to completion.)

What a team pays

Four account managers, each sending up to 10 documents a month, on monthly billing:

Service (as published October 11, 2026)	Price for 4 senders	Allowance
Attest, Signing plan	$20 a month ($5 per account)	20 documents per account a month
Zoho Sign Standard	$48 a month ($12 per user; $10 per user billed annually)	25 envelopes per user a month
Dropbox Sign Standard	$120 a month ($30 per user; $25 per user billed annually)	Unlimited signature requests
PandaDoc Starter	$140 a month ($35 per user; $19 per user billed annually)	Unlimited documents
DocuSign Standard	$180 a month ($45 per user; $30 per user on an annual plan)	Up to 10 envelopes per user a month

Clients and freelancers never pay to sign, on any plan. Signing a document a client sends you through Attest is free and uses none of your documents.

Set up the agency

1. Each account manager goes to attest.datahubz.com/sign, clicks Start free, signs in with their work email and sets up their signing key, with a passkey and a recovery phrase, on the Security page.
2. Each one chooses a plan on the Plan & usage page, or accepts an invitation to your organization if DataHubz has arranged an organization plan for it.
3. To send, click New agreement, attach the PDF, add the client's signers, choose Private, click Next: place the fields, place the fields and click Create and send.
4. The first time a client signer uses Attest, Attest emails you: click Unlock it for …, confirm, and approve with your passkey. Your browser releases it to them, never Attest.
5. When everyone has signed, every party downloads the same sealed copy: the signed pages, with a "Signed with Attest" stamp on each signature and a seal line at the foot of every page, a certificate of completion, the audit trail up to completion and a "Verify it yourself, without us" page, with the full evidence, the original document and a standalone verifier attached inside.