Keylio
Keylio built a back-office platform for property owners managing rental assets, everything from bookings and leases to expenses, across both long-term and short-term rentals. When founder Pierre Hulin needed e-signatures for lease paperwork, he wanted a feature his users would never notice paying for.
Cost Was the Whole Search
Keylio started as Pierre's side project. He's a software engineer with a full-time role at a large software company, and he built the platform originally to manage his own rental properties in the US and France. It grew into something other owners wanted too, and Keylio now has properties under management in the US, France, and Australia, with the platform running in English, French, and German as it expands across the rest of Europe.
Before Firma.dev, Keylio had no e-signature tool at all. Signing wasn't a solved problem inside the platform, it was a gap Pierre needed to close before he could offer lease and rental agreements as an in-app feature. He didn't shop around. Firma.dev was his first stop, and it turned out to be his only one.
I think cost was kind of the number one criteria initially, and then everything else kind of fell into place because it was so easy to deploy. I guess the ease of use was a nice surprise, rather than the primary goal, because I didn't have experience with any of the other ones.
— Pierre Hulin, Keylio
Under an Hour, No Detours
Pierre had the integration running in under an hour, working from Firma.dev's docs. For a one-person engineering team shipping a production app, that speed matters. So does the absence of surprises along the way.
I think the biggest benefit is that I didn't run into any issue. Cost management, I guess, is the other one. It's really compelling.
— Pierre Hulin, Keylio
A Feature That Doesn't Touch the Price Tag
The real story is in the math. Keylio charges $10 a month for the platform. An average user manages about two properties across a mix of long-term and short-term rentals, landing at roughly one signature a month. At $3 an envelope, a common price point for API access elsewhere, that single signature would eat 30% of the entire monthly subscription for that user. At €0.049 an envelope (~5 cents USD), it barely registers.
That difference is what let Keylio ship e-signatures as a bundled feature rather than a pricing problem. No pay-per-use surcharge, no seperate premium tier, no renegotiating what $10 a month buys.
If one signature is $3, that's a 30% cost from our subscription that would go into that signature, if it were referred as a full-on feature. So the cost is huge, the savings is huge there. We would have to change our pricing model, add that as a pay-per-use type of thing, or change the whole pricing and embed that into a more premium bundle.
— Pierre Hulin, Keylio
Twenty Years in Enterprise, Still Surprised
Pierre has spent two decades in enterprise software, so he didn't walk in with a specific list of expectations. What stood out was how fast the support team responded when he ran into a small issue with his signing templates.
I've been in the enterprise space for 20 years, so I would say no, just because my expectations have been all over the place. I didn't have specific expectations, but I've been very pleased with the responsiveness of the support team when I had one question or one small issue with the templates.
— Pierre Hulin, Keylio
Comparison
DocuSign
Firma.dev
Pricing model
~$15/envelope, enterprise contracts
€0.049/envelope (~5 cents USD), pay-as-you-go
Contract minimums
Monthly/annual minimums
None
Setup time
Sales-led onboarding, days to weeks
Under an hour
Impact on a $10/mo plan
Exceeds the entire subscription per signature
Under 1% of subscription per signature
Built for
Enterprise procurement teams
Solo and small engineering teams
