When we launched our free eSign plan over a year ago, we wanted to accomplish one thing – to keep businesses running and people working during the pandemic. Okay, well, that’s two things, but you get what we mean. ?

And while we aren’t entirely out of the pandemic woods yet, we do have a lot to be proud of and have come a long way since March 2020. (Partly in thanks to our amazing, rockstar customers!)

In just one year, the PandaDoc free eSign plan has achieved:

  • Over 200,000 people signed up for the plan
  • Of these users, over one million documents were sent
  • Thus increasing our active users by 60%

The plan was initially introduced to the market as the industry’s first forever-free and unlimited eSignature solution. But we wanted to enable our users of the free plan to do more. So we created more features and capabilities to continue to provide our customers with an easy and seamless eSignature experience that integrates with anyone’s existing workflow.

We enhanced the plan’s ability to make eSigning easier with integrations with Google, Microsoft, Canva, and more. PandaDoc users can now request and track signatures within Microsoft Word documents, access millions of Canva design features to bring their documents to life, and leverage enhanced functionality with Gmail and Google Docs to save time and effort.

In addition to releasing expanded functionality, we chose these features in part thanks to a survey we conducted with OnePoll. We needed to gain insight into how this new remote work life, which is looking like it’s here to stay, has impacted the industry and our customer’s day-to-day lives. We discovered some interesting stats:

  • Over 90% of Americans who have worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic have eSigned at least one document in the last year.
  • Remote workers eSigned an average of just over eight documents while working from home during the pandemic.
  • 45% stated the adoption of electronic signature software has helped them save time during their workday.
  • 72% of respondents stated they’d adopted new software while working from home.
  • Of those who adopted new software solutions, 78% stated that they made working from home easier.

We look forward to reinforcing these findings in future content but here’s hoping that even though electronic signatures have provided benefits for years, the recent surge in remote work hopefully has accelerated everyone’s interest in and encourages the adoption of electronic signatures. We also look forward to discovering that eSignatures are the signature of choice across more non-traditional industries, use cases, and geographies too.

Well, it’s safe to say that the free eSign plan is here to stay, but we feel our CEO, Mikita Mikado, put it best: “While the adoption of eSignatures by businesses and organizations was gathering serious momentum, the pandemic clearly accelerated the process and elevated the importance of eSignatures from a nice-to-have, to a must-have.”

Cheers, free eSign plan; here’s to millions of more documents. ?

For more information on the free eSign product, check out our original blog post or visit our website.