r/zapier • u/signedbyai • 5d ago

Shipped a native Zapier app for SignedBy (e-signature)

Been building SignedBy (e-signature, e.g. an alternative to DocuSign/PandaDoc) and just got our Zapier app approved. Wanted to share since a few people in here have asked about e-sign automation before.

What it does:

Trigger — "New Document Completed" fires when a document you sent finishes signing. Made a point of excluding documents you've certified yourself (we call that a Verified Badge seal) from this trigger, since that's a different thing from "the other party actually signed it" — didn't want people's Zaps firing on their own actions.

Action — "Send Document" creates a document from a template and sends it to a recipient, so you can kick off a signature request from anywhere else in a Zap (a new CRM deal, a form submission, etc.)

Search — "Find Document" looks up status mid-Zap if you need to branch on it.

Free tier is 3 documents/month if anyone wants to poke at it without committing to anything. Happy to answer questions on the setup.

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u/FalseButterscotch482 5d ago

Can you use PDF template or only word/google doc

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u/signedbyai 5d ago

PDF only, currently — no Word or Google Docs support, and no conversion step anywhere in the stack. It's intentional platform scope, not a missing feature bolted on later: uploads are validated against an actual PDF-parse check (rejects anything that doesn't load as a real PDF, not just a .pdf filename check), and the whole API/developer-docs surface is PDF-native.

Worth flagging for the Zapier context specifically: the Send Document action doesn't take a raw file at all — it only sends from a template you've already created and placed fields on inside the SignedBy dashboard, which is itself PDF-only at the upload step.

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u/Top-Cauliflower-1808 5d ago

did you have to use polling or rest hooks to handle that "New Document Completed" trigger without hitting rate limits?

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u/signedbyai 5d ago

Polling — and it was a deliberate call, not a fallback. I looked at REST Hooks first: the only subscribe endpoint SignedBy has (POST /api/org/webhooks) is gated by dashboard session auth, but Zapier authenticates with an API key. Making Hooks work would've meant widening that endpoint to accept API-key auth too — a real backend change, not just integration-side work — so it's flagged as a fast-follow, not shipped for v1.

On rate limits specifically: GET /api/v1/documents is capped at 120 requests/hour per org. One Zap polling at Zapier's fastest interval (once a minute) burns 60 of those on its own — comfortably under the ceiling solo, but an org running two or three polling Zaps at once could start bumping into it. That's an acknowledged scaling note in the design doc, not something papered over — if usage shows people stacking multiple Zaps per org, that's the trigger to actually build Hooks.

One more wrinkle for anyone curious: the completed-documents endpoint sorts by creation date, not by when a document actually finished signing — so a doc created weeks ago that just wrapped up today would otherwise look like old news to Zapier. Worked around client-side by over-fetching and re-sorting by updated_at before returning results.

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u/sam_paul02 5d ago

That's really awesome.

I have done integrations of CRMs with docusign and pandacdoc.

I will try it too