VendorFlow
VendorFlow replaced a poorly supported homegrown e-signature solution with Firma.dev's API, cutting onboarding friction for their trucking customers while avoiding the $2-per-envelope API pricing that made every other provider a non-starter.
Too Expensive to Buy, Too Painful to Build
VendorFlow is a communications platform for the trucking industry. Think of it as a phone system purpose-built for fleets, combining team messaging and voice into a single tool for operations teams and their drivers. About 70% of their customers operate in the drayage space, handling the chaotic first mile from ports and railheads where there's a massive volume of voice and text interactions happening constantly.
The team had been in trucking for 10 years, building bespoke software like transportation management systems and mobile trucker apps. When it came to e-signatures for customer onboarding, they built their own bare-bones solution. Not because they wanted to, but because the alternatives were priced for a different universe.
PandaDoc and similar providers were charging around $2 per envelope for API access. DocuSign wanted a $20,000 monthly minimum just to get workspace-level verticalization. For a company serving an industry with extremely tight margins, where customers would never absorb those costs, buying was never on the table.
The idea that PandaDoc or DocuSign or whatever these providers charge for API access, it's an incredible price point for a company like us to pay. And then they demand something like $2 an envelope, which is just a non-starter.
— Greg Bujak, VendorFlow
Clean APIs, Customer Workspaces
Greg found Firma.dev through a Google search. After years of maintaining a DIY solution he didn't want to be maintaining, the pricing alone was enough to get his attention. But what impressed him went beyond cost.
The APIs were clear and straightforward. API keys were easy to generate. And the workspace segmentation, the ability to provision seperate workspaces per customer, was exactly the kind of verticalization VendorFlow needed. Each of their trucking customers gets a clean, isolated environment with no risk of data leakage between accounts.
This was the feature that providers like PandaDoc structurally discourage. Greg described how with other tools, if his customers start sending hundreds of signing requests, it all lands in one big pile with no segmentation. Good luck figuring out whose documents belong to whom. With Firma.dev, everything is verticalized per workspace, and those workspaces are provisioned via API so the setup can be fully automated when a new customer signs up.
I was super impressed by the segmentation of workspaces. I see where we can go with this. The white-labeling is fully in place too. VendorFlow's customers interact with the signing experience without ever knowing Firma.dev exists under the hood.
— Greg Bujak, VendorFlow
Onboarding Without Disruption
The immediate use case is customer onboarding. VendorFlow's onboarding flow involves a lot of documentation, and before Firma.dev, any signing step meant disrupting that flow to use manual tools. Pulling e-signatures directly into the onboarding workflow has been, in Greg's words, "a real lifesaver."
The team is still early in the integration, but the reduction in manual work is already measurable. Greg estimates they're saving a couple of hours per week in customer service time, just from eliminating the friction of the old DIY approach.
And there's a much bigger opportunity ahead. In trucking, drivers handle electronic records constantly, things like proof of delivery that need signatures multiple times per day. At $2 per envelope, that math was impossible. At €0.049 (~5¢ USD), it becomes a viable product feature that VendorFlow can offer to their customers without destroying anyone's margins.
Being able to pull this in and reduce the onboarding time for that workflow has been a real lifesaver.
— Greg Bujak, VendorFlow
Built for the Developer
When asked what surprised him about working with Firma.dev, Greg kept coming back to how developer-first the experience felt. The onboarding was clean. The API keys appeared without friction. The documentation was accessible and clear.
For a team that had spent years building bespoke trucking software, that matters. They know what good developer tooling looks like, and they know what "API as an afterthought" looks like. Firma.dev landed firmly in the first category.
It feels like it was built for the developer as opposed to kind of an afterthought and stitched together.
— Greg Bujak, VendorFlow
Comparison
DocuSign
Firma.dev
API access
€0.049/envelope (~5¢ USD)
€0.049/envelope (~5¢ USD)
Pricing model
Pay-as-you-go
Pay-as-you-go
Customer workspaces
Included, API-provisioned
Included, API-provisioned
White-label
Included
Included
Contract minimums
None
None
Setup complexity
API keys in minutes
API keys in minutes
Built for developers
API-first
API-first
