HelloSign Free Plan (2026): 3 Signature Requests a Month, on a Clock Nobody Mentions

Last updated October 6, 2026 · ~13 min read · by StackHonest

Short answer: there is no HelloSign any more — the product has been Dropbox Sign since Dropbox rebranded it, and it lives at sign.dropbox.com. Its free plan does exist, and it is 3 signature requests per month. But the number is the easy part. The number in the brief is right and the clock in the brief is wrong: Dropbox Sign's help centre states the three requests "renew every 30 days from the day you sign up" and explicitly "do not refresh based on the calendar month", so if you burn all three on the 20th you are stuck until the 20th of next month, not the 1st. Two more things nobody quotes: Edit & Resend on an already-sent document deducts another document from your balance, and the free plan is not on the pricing page at all — the paid grid starts at Essentials $15/user/month billed yearly ($180/year) or $20 month-to-month, with Standard $25/user/month yearly or $30 monthly and Premium quote-only. Every figure below was read off the vendors' own pages on October 6, 2026.

First correction: the brief is shopping for a product that no longer has that name

This page started from a one-line brief: "HelloSign's free tier gives three signature requests each month with unlimited signers and a basic audit trail." Before any of that can be checked, the name has to be dealt with. sign.dropbox.com/products/dropbox-sign/pricing calls the product Dropbox Sign throughout; the word HelloSign does not appear on the plan cards, the feature table or the pricing FAQ. The old hellosign.com addresses now land on Dropbox-branded pages.

That matters for more than trivia. If you are comparing quotes or reading a years-old roundup, "HelloSign free: 3 docs" is the same product under a different badge — but the plan around it has moved, and the single biggest move is that the free plan has been taken off the pricing page. More on that below, because it is the reason most write-ups of this plan are stale.

The free plan: 3 signature requests, and the rolling 30-day clock

The free plan's terms are published, just not where you would look for them. Dropbox Sign's help centre article Can I use Dropbox Sign for free? (help.dropbox.com/plans/dropbox-sign-free-plan, stamped "Updated Dec 04, 2025") says it in one line:

A second article, Dropbox Sign free document limits (help.dropbox.com/plans/out-of-free-documents-dropbox-sign, same December 2025 stamp), spells the clock out with an example and adds the detail that costs people a document without warning:

• "Those documents renew every 30 days from the day you originally sign up. They do not refresh based on the calendar month."
• "For instance, if you signed up for Dropbox Sign on January 17th, your pages will renew every 17th of the month." Use all three on the 17th, 20th and 21st and "you will still be out of docs until they renew on February 17th."
• "Making any changes to your document once it has been sent (such as using the Edit & Resend feature) will deduct another document from your available balance."

Read those together and the practical allowance on a free plan is not three sends a month. It is three sends per rolling 30-day window, minus one for every correction you have to resend. One wrong signer email address on a contract and your month's third document is gone.

Dropbox Sign's own two help pages disagree about whether self-signing counts

Here is the part I cannot resolve for you, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Dropbox Sign's own two help pages disagree about whether self-signing counts against the free allowance, and both carry the same "Updated Dec 04, 2025" stamp:

Those are not two framings of one rule. One says self-signing is free and uncapped; the other says a self-signed document consumes one of your three transactions. A third article, on the Dropbox integration, uses the "three document transactions per month" wording as well. I have quoted all of them rather than picking the generous one, because the generous one is the one every blog post repeats and it may be the wrong one. If your use case is signing your own documents at volume on the free plan, test it on a throwaway month before you depend on it.

The same document pricing options article also closes off the obvious middle option: "We don't yet offer a pay-per-doc option because we offer the free version of Dropbox Sign for low volume users." So there is no way to buy a fourth document. The step above three requests is a subscription.

What the brief got wrong about signers and the audit trail

• "Three signature requests each month" — right number, wrong clock. Correct as a count, wrong as a cadence: it is a rolling 30-day window anchored to your signup date, and Edit & Resend eats into it.
• "Unlimited signers" — not published anywhere I could read. What is published is better framed than the brief managed: one signature request can carry one or more documents to one or more signers and still count as one request, provided it goes out as a single bundle. That is a genuinely useful property — a three-party agreement costs you one of your three. But no signer cap is printed on either the pricing page or the help articles, and absence of a published cap is not the same thing as "unlimited", so you will not find the word on this page. Bulk send — the CSV-driven many-signers feature people usually mean — is explicitly "available on our Standard and Premium plans", i.e. not free.
• "A basic audit trail" — understated in one direction, overstated in the other. The help centre's answer to "Is the audit trail free too?" is a flat "Yes": a completed signature request returns a PDF of the signed documents plus an audit trail, with no "basic" qualifier anywhere. But the same answer carves out self-signed documents: sign something with the "Just Me" option and there is no audit trail at all, "since you're the only signer." So the audit trail is full-fat where it exists and absent exactly where the free plan is most generous.

The free plan is missing from the pricing page — and the help centre links you to it anyway

This is the finding that explains why so much published advice about this plan is wrong. The Can I use Dropbox Sign for free? article ends by telling you to "Check out the Dropbox Sign Plans & Pricing to see everything our Free plan includes and to compare it with our paid plans."

I did. There is no Free column. The pricing page shows three plan cards — Essentials, Standard, Premium — under the headline "Unlimited signature requests with no hidden fees", and a feature comparison table with exactly those three columns. The free plan's entire presence on that page is one line of small print near the bottom: "Just need to sign a document? Try our free plan", linking straight into the signup flow rather than to any description of what the plan contains.

So the vendor's own support article points at a page that no longer documents the thing it is describing. Nothing on the pricing page tells you about the three-request allowance, the 30-day rolling clock, the Edit & Resend deduction or the self-signing question. If you want the free plan's terms you have to go to the help centre and read three articles, two of which contradict each other.

What the paid plans actually cost, both billing cycles

Read off the pricing page on October 6 2026, with the "Billed monthly" and "Billed yearly" control clicked both ways:

Both paid tiers carry "unlimited signature requests" per the page's own headline and feature table. Email support is listed on all three columns. Google Drive, Microsoft Word and HubSpot integrations are listed across all three; Salesforce appears on Standard and Premium, with a footnote reading "Additional cost add-on, contact sales for details" attached to the select-integrations row — so a listed integration is not automatically an included one.

One arithmetic note, flagged as arithmetic rather than quoted as fact: $600 is exactly 24 × $25, which lines up with Standard's "2 or more" users row. The page does not state in dollars that the $600 is two seats, so treat the seat count behind that number as something to confirm at checkout.

And one thing I found in the markup that I will not turn into a price claim: the plan cards contain unused coupon fields showing $10.05 USD/mo ($120.60 billed yearly) for Essentials and $17.50 USD/user/mo ($420 billed yearly) for Standard, neither of which the page displayed to me. I cannot tell whether those rates are offered to anyone, so the prices quoted in the table above are the ones the page actually rendered. If you see a discount banner at checkout, that is the shape of it.

The cost of the fourth document

Plain multiplication on the published rates, nothing modelled:

• Free gives 3 requests per 30 days = 36 a year, at $0.
• Essentials is $180/year for unlimited requests. If you send exactly 4 a month, each one costs $3.75. At 10 a month it is $1.50. At 50 a month it is 30 cents.
• So the free-to-paid decision is not about volume in the abstract. It is about whether you ever need a fourth send inside one 30-day window, because there is no pay-per-document option to bridge it.

That is the real trap in this plan shape: three a month is plenty for an occasional contract, and completely unworkable the one month you onboard two clients and fix a typo. The jump is $0 to $180/year with nothing in between.

Free e-signature plans compared: who gives the most at $0

All four pricing pages read the same day, October 6 2026, with every billing toggle clicked both ways:

Zoho Sign (zoho.com/sign/pricing.html) publishes the largest free allowance of the four: US$0, single user only, 5 envelopes per month, with signature workflows, reminders and notifications, signing with Zoho's own digital certificate, an audit trail, cloud-storage import/export and the mobile and desktop apps all listed on the free card. Paid: Standard US$10/user/month billed annually or US$12 monthly (25 envelopes per user per month), Professional US$16/$20 (unlimited envelopes, unlimited templates, branding), Enterprise US$22/$28 (bulk send, in-person signing, payment collection, APIs and webhooks), plus a quote-only custom plan. The page states "Local taxes (VAT, GST, etc.) will be charged in addition." Its FAQ is also clear that signers never need an account, and that the 14-day Enterprise trial watermarks every document it signs and is capped at 10 users, 50 envelopes, 3 recipients per envelope and 5 envelopes a day.

SignWell (signwell.com/pricing) matches Dropbox Sign's three on the free plan and is more explicit about it: $0, 1 sender, 1 template, 3 documents a month, API included with 3 free API documents a month, with "Audit Trail & Tamper-Proof" and "Advanced Security" shown as active and Template Links, Bulk Send, Compliance Certifications, Custom Branding, Conditional Field Rules, Data Validation, Request Attachments, In-Person Signing and Dedicated Support greyed out. Paid: Light $10/month billed yearly or $12 monthly (1 sender, extra senders $10/$12 each, 5 templates per sender, unlimited documents, 15 free API documents a month) and Business $30 yearly or $36 monthly (3 senders, extra senders $12/$15 each, unlimited templates, 25 free API documents, 50 SMS credits a month), with Enterprise quote-only for teams of 50 or more. The page advertises "Save 20% when you choose an Annual plan."

Docusign (docusign.com/products-and-pricing, which resolves to ecom.docusign.com) has no free tier in its eSignature grid at all, and its envelope allowances are the most surprising numbers on this page. See the next heading.

The Docusign finding: committing to a year cuts your envelope allowance

Docusign's pricing page carries a "Subscription Type" control with three options — "Annual | Billed upfront (Save up to 44%)", "Annual | Billed monthly (Save up to 33%)" and "Monthly". Switching between the two I could reach does not only change the price. It changes what you are allowed to send.

Work it through. On the monthly subscription, Standard allows 10 envelopes per user per month — 120 a year. On the annual commitment, the same plan allows 100 per user per year. The annual deal is 33% cheaper and gives you 17% fewer envelopes. Both figures are printed in Docusign's own comparison table, in the "Envelope sends" row, and both wordings appear in the plan cards' benefit lists. I have reproduced them as printed; I have no explanation for why the discount costs allowance, and I am not going to invent one.

The other number worth keeping: Personal at $132 a year for 60 envelopes a year is $2.20 per envelope. Dropbox Sign Essentials at $180 a year with unlimited requests therefore undercuts Docusign Personal per envelope above roughly 82 envelopes a year ($180 ÷ $2.20). And Docusign's "Real-time audit trail" row reads "Includes" on all four columns, so the audit trail is not the differentiator anyone sells it as.

Per-envelope cost, where the published numbers actually land

• Cheapest published cost per envelope on a paid plan: Zoho Sign Standard. $10/user/month annually = $120/year for 25 envelopes a month (300 a year) = 40 cents per envelope.
• Zoho Sign Standard beats Dropbox Sign Essentials until about 450 envelopes a year. $180 ÷ $0.40 = 450. Above that, flat-rate unlimited wins; below it, you are paying for headroom you are not using.
• Cheapest unlimited-document plan: SignWell Light at $120/year, against Dropbox Sign Essentials at $180/year for the same unlimited promise — 50% more money for one sender either way. Zoho Sign Professional at $16/user/month annually ($192/year) is the other unlimited-envelope option, $12 a year above Dropbox Sign.
• At $0, the ranking is: Zoho Sign 5 envelopes, then Dropbox Sign 3 requests and SignWell 3 documents, then Docusign with nothing. Dropbox Sign's edge over SignWell is the multi-document, multi-signer bundle counting as one request; SignWell's edge is that its free terms are printed on the pricing page where you can actually find them.

When each free plan is the right answer

1. You sign your own documents and rarely request signatures. Dropbox Sign, on the stated-but-contradicted unlimited self-signing — verify it on a throwaway month, and remember self-signed documents come with no audit trail.
2. You send four or five short agreements a month. Zoho Sign free, at 5 envelopes, is the only free plan of the four that covers you without a subscription.
3. You want the free terms in writing before you commit. SignWell, whose free column is on the pricing page itself with every excluded feature visibly greyed out.
4. You need a signature today and three a month forever after. Any of the three free plans. None of them is Docusign, which has no free tier to fall back to.
5. You are sending enough that you will hit a cap. Price per envelope, not per month: Zoho Sign Standard at 40 cents is the cheapest published rate until roughly 450 a year, after which a flat unlimited plan is cheaper, and SignWell Light is the cheapest of those at $120/year.

Notice that none of those answers is "whichever is the biggest brand". The envelope maths crosses over in places that have nothing to do with reputation.

What I could not verify, and will not guess

• Dropbox Sign Premium's price. Quote-only: the card says "Get a custom quote." No figure appears on the page, so none appears here.
• Whether the coupon rates in Dropbox Sign's markup are available to anyone. $10.05/mo for Essentials and $17.50/user/mo for Standard sit in the page's own plan cards but were never displayed to me. I report their existence and quote the rendered prices.
• Which of Dropbox Sign's two contradictory self-signing rules is operative. Both are quoted above, both stamped December 2025. I could not resolve it from published material and did not sign up to test it, so nothing on this page depends on the answer.
• Whether Dropbox Sign's free plan has a signer cap or includes templates. No signer number is printed, and the pricing page's template row has no Free column. Not claimed as limited, not claimed as unlimited.
• Docusign's "Annual | Billed upfront" prices. The control advertises "Save up to 44%" but would not switch into that view for me across repeated attempts, so no upfront-annual Docusign figure is quoted here — only the annual-billed-monthly and month-to-month columns I could actually read.
• The seat count behind Dropbox Sign Standard's "$600 billed yearly". $600 ÷ $25 ÷ 12 = 2 seats, which matches the "2 or more" users row, but that is my arithmetic and not a sentence the page prints.
• Any speed, completion-rate or time-saved benchmark for e-signature tools. No audited public benchmark compares these four, and none was run for this page. Docusign's "Get signatures 65% faster" line is marketing for a paid SMS add-on, SignWell's quotes are user-submitted testimonials, and neither is evidence of anything. There is no performance claim anywhere on this page.
• Non-US pricing, tax treatment and checkout totals. All figures are the USD columns as displayed to me; Zoho states local taxes are added on top and Docusign footnotes "Additional tax may apply" on every card.
• Dropbox Sign API pricing. A separate product on a separate page, not read for this article.

Verdict

The brief's number survived and almost nothing else did. Three signature requests a month is real, but it is a rolling 30-day allowance tied to your signup date, one Edit & Resend costs you a document, "unlimited signers" is not something the vendor publishes, and the audit trail is better than "basic" where it applies and entirely absent on self-signed documents. The product is not called HelloSign, its free plan is no longer documented on its pricing page, and two of the vendor's own help articles contradict each other on the single question that decides whether the free plan is generous or tight.

If you want an e-signature tool that costs nothing and will not run out on you, Zoho Sign's free plan is 5 envelopes a month against Dropbox Sign's 3 and Docusign's zero, and its cheapest paid tier is a third less money. If you want the terms of a free plan printed where a buyer can read them, SignWell wins on that alone. And if you are already in Dropbox and only need the occasional contract signed, the free plan is genuinely useful — just set a reminder for the day of the month it resets, because it will not be the 1st.

More free-tier reality checks from the same series: Bitwarden's free plan is the rare one whose "unlimited" claim survives intact, Zoho CRM's free plan limits takes apart the 3-user free CRM from the same vendor, Jotform's free plan limits covers the unprinted-cap problem in forms, Calendly's free plan limits does it for scheduling, and Wave's free invoicing plan does it for billing. The Template availability currently offers no download or email signup. Related reading: best AI automation tools.

FAQ

Does HelloSign still exist, and does it still have a free plan?

The product is now called Dropbox Sign and lives at sign.dropbox.com; the HelloSign name does not appear on its pricing page. The free plan still exists: Dropbox Sign's help centre states it "lets you send 3 free signature requests per month", with unlimited self-signing noted in one article and contradicted in another.

How many documents can you send free on Dropbox Sign each month?

Three signature requests. The help centre is explicit that they "renew every 30 days from the day you sign up" and "do not refresh based on the calendar month", so the reset date is your signup anniversary, not the 1st. Using Edit & Resend on a document you already sent "will deduct another document from your available balance."

Does a Dropbox Sign free signature request cover multiple signers?

Yes, and this is the plan's best feature. The help centre defines a signature request as "the entire transaction of preparing and sending one or more documents to be electronically signed by one or more signers", and "as long as you send the document(s) to the signer(s) in a single bundle, it counts as only one signature request." No signer cap is published, which is not the same as the plan being unlimited. Bulk send via CSV is a Standard and Premium feature, not a free one.

Do you get an audit trail on the Dropbox Sign free plan?

For signature requests, yes: the help centre answers "Is the audit trail free too?" with "Yes. When your signature request is completed, you'll receive a PDF of the signed document(s) plus an audit trail." The exception is self-signed documents — those signed with the "Just Me" option "don't include an audit trail since you're the only signer."

How much does Dropbox Sign cost in 2026?

Essentials is $15 USD per month billed yearly ($180 USD a year) or $20 month-to-month, for one user and 5 templates. Standard is $25 USD per user per month billed yearly ("Starting at $600 USD billed yearly") or $30 monthly, for two or more users and 15 templates. Premium is quote-only. Both paid tiers advertise unlimited signature requests. There is no pay-per-document option: the help centre says so outright.

Which e-signature tool has the most generous free plan?

Of the four pages read on October 6 2026, Zoho Sign: US$0 for a single user with 5 envelopes a month, an audit trail, reminders and signature workflows. Dropbox Sign and SignWell both give 3 a month, and Docusign publishes no free plan at all in its eSignature grid. Per envelope on paid plans, Zoho Sign Standard at $10/user/month annually for 25 envelopes a month works out at 40 cents each.

Is Docusign's annual plan really cheaper?

Cheaper per month, smaller per year in what you can send. On the month-to-month subscription type Standard is $45/user/month with 10 envelopes per user per month (120 a year); on the annual commitment it is $30/user/month ($360) with 100 envelopes per user per year. Both numbers are printed in Docusign's own "Envelope sends" comparison row. That is 33% off the price and 17% off the allowance.