Sign and Send

As I’ve mentioned, I built an early prototype (which you can still see here of Sign and Send last tax season. It worked, but just barely.

Code-wise, it’s a bog-standard Rails (Rails 4, probably?) that I hosted on Heroku. The more interesting parts are the APIs I used to do the signing and sending.

HelloSign

For signing, I used HelloSign’s eSignature API product. In general, I’m a huge fan HelloSign and their sister service, HelloFax. Their API product was good, too, but not a great fit for what I’m doing.

In particular, I had to use their template functionality to let people designate where they needed to sign. This created problems because the use had to designate where they needed to sign and then actually sign in two completely separate steps. Rather unintuitive.

This is HelloSign’s fault, I’m just not using their API in an, um, unique way. The API is really meant for organization that regularly has people sign a limited set of documents. Set up the templates for the documents then just use the template anytime someone needs to sign.

Their pricing reflects this thinking as well, in that it’s largely segmented by the number of templates you get. My prototype was running on the Bronze package, which only gives you one template, so it had the interesting property of supporting exactly one user concurrently.

Lob

For the physical mailing of the documents, I used Lob. I don’t know what to say other than IT’S AN API FOR PHYSICAL MAIL. Literally. And, to me at least, that’s bonkers amazing.

Even better, their APIs are modern. Their dashboard is helpful. And you can mail letters, postcards, and even checks.

The checks functionality is pretty cool. You link your checking account (verified with micro-deposits, I believe) and then, WHAMO, you can have Lob print and mail a check for you. I used it to pay my attorney/accountant (when I still had one) several times using the dashboard (not the API).

(The was actually a slighting harrowing experience. The dashboard is very much not designed to by used for manual one-offs. So much so that it does not offer a confirmation after you enter your check info and is very much explicit that “IS THIS CORRECT? PRESSING SEND WILL IRREVOCABLY SEND A REAL LIVE CHECK.” In my case, it was not correct, and I had added an extra zero and mistakenly sent my attorney a $5,000 not $500 check.)

I really just cannot say enough good things about Lob.