Sarah L.

Sarah is an active real estate broker in Toronto handling 25-30 transactions per year. Each transaction generates 5-10 documents that need signatures: purchase agreements, addendums, disclosures, agency agreements, lender forms. That works out to 20-30 envelopes per month in DocuSign-speak.

DocuSign Real Estate Starter — the plan most agents pay for — costs $25/month and includes only 5 envelopes. To match her actual volume, she'd need to upgrade to Standard at $40/month or Realtor at $60/month. Either way, she was paying significant money for the privilege of sending PDFs to clients.

On top of that: DocuSign's mobile signing experience felt clunky compared to modern apps, and her older clients (the ones buying retirement homes) often needed her to walk them through the signing process by phone.

Sarah found Konomic through a Toronto-area real estate Facebook group. She started with the free tier to test Sign Request on a low-stakes addendum. The recipient — a 70-year-old client buying her first condo since 1985 — signed in 90 seconds without a follow-up call. That was the moment Sarah was sold.

She upgraded to Konomic Business at $14.99/month — same price as a single DocuSign seat but with 100 envelopes per month(more than she'd ever use) plus 30+ bundled PDF tools.

The DocuSign price wall

Real estate agents have a love-hate relationship with DocuSign. It's the de-facto standard, every brokerage uses it, every transaction coordinator knows it. But the pricing assumes every agent is sending 100+ envelopes per month — which works for high-volume teams but punishes solo brokers and part-time agents.

Sarah is somewhere in the middle: full-time but not on a mega team. Her envelope volume varies wildly — 8 envelopes some months, 35 in busy spring months. The DocuSign per-envelope counting felt arbitrary and stressful.

Konomic onboarding

Sarah migrated her template library in an evening. Her standard documents:

• OREA Form 100 (Agreement of Purchase and Sale) — uploaded as a template
• OREA Form 101 (Schedule A) — saved alongside the main agreement
• Buyer Representation Agreement — template with her brokerage details
• Pre-completed addendums she uses repeatedly

For each template, she creates a Sign Request when needed, fills in the client-specific fields, and sends. The receipt experience for her clients is identical to DocuSign — email link, sign on any device, audit trail.

Beyond signing

The bundled PDF tools turned out to be more useful than Sarah expected:

• Merge PDF — combines all her transaction documents into one closing package for her real estate lawyer and the buyer's lender.
• Compress PDF — shrinks 100 MB inspection reports to under 25 MB so she can email them to clients without using cloud links.
• Redact PDF — removes buyer SSN and financial details when sharing comparable sales with other agents.
• PDF Editor — fills in OREA forms directly in the browser instead of printing and scanning.

The numbers

• DocuSign Standard cost: $40/month × 12 = $480/year (would have been needed for her volume)
• Konomic Business cost: $14.99/month × 12 = $180/year
• Net annual savings: $300+ direct, plus the cost of Adobe Acrobat she would have needed
• Envelope capacity: 5x more than what she actually uses
• Zero client complaints about the new signing experience

What Sarah would tell other agents

"Real estate agents are stuck in this myth that you need DocuSign because everyone uses DocuSign. Your clients don't care which platform you use. They care that the link works on their phone and the signing takes 30 seconds. Konomic does that for less money."

"The bundled PDF tools were a surprise bonus. I haven't opened Adobe Reader in 6 months."