You send a contract. Someone signs it. Then what?
Be honest, you're not sure. The signed PDF got emailed back. It's in a shared drive somewhere, or maybe still in someone's inbox. The obligations inside it? The deadlines, the deliverables, the date it needs to be renewed? Those live in someone's head. Maybe a spreadsheet. More often, nowhere at all.
This is the agreement lifecycle problem. It's bigger than most people realize, and the industry has spent a decade solving only the flashiest piece of it.
One step down, six to go
Every agreement in your business moves through the same arc: drafting, negotiating, routing, signing, executing, storing, renewing. Seven steps. Seven opportunities for things to fall through cracks.
The last ten years of software investment went almost entirely toward step four. DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and their competitors killed the wet signature. That was a real win. But somewhere along the way, "agreement management" became synonymous with "getting a signature," and the other six steps got left to fend for themselves.
The draft still gets built in Word. Negotiation is an email thread with twelve attachments and a subject line that starts with "RE: RE: RE: FINAL." Routing is a polite Slack message that says "hey, can you sign this and forward it to Sarah?" And once the ink is dry — digitally speaking — the executed agreement disappears into a folder that nobody opens until something goes wrong.
Billions of dollars in enterprise software spending, and the average company's agreement process still has a spreadsheet at the center of it.
The bottleneck moved. The tools didn't.
When eSignature first arrived, the pitch was simple: stop mailing things. Replace paper with clicks. Speed up turnaround from days to hours. Totally worth paying for.
But that was the bottleneck of 2012. In 2026, signing is the fast part. The slow parts are everything around it — the draft that needs three rounds of internal review, the routing that requires chasing people through four different channels, the post-execution obligations that nobody tracks until a deadline lands on someone's desk two weeks late.
Meanwhile, the tools built for the 2012 bottleneck keep getting more expensive. Pricing models designed when digital signatures were novel — per seat, per envelope, per API call — now punish companies for using their own software more. Want to give another department access? That's a new tier. More teams need to send agreements? More seats. The thing that was supposed to eliminate friction has become its own source of it.
The category got comfortable solving one step well and charging more for it every year. The problem kept expanding around it.
What "Draft to Done" means in practice
At Propper, we think about agreements as a connected workflow, not a series of disconnected transactions.
Draft to Done is the idea that every stage — from the moment someone opens a blank document to the moment the last obligation is fulfilled — should talk to every other stage. Not in some abstract, future-vision way. In practical, everyday ways.
When signing is connected to drafting, you stop playing version control roulette with documents that have traveled through five inboxes. When execution is connected to storage, you get searchable, auditable records without anyone having to manually file anything. When renewal dates are connected to original terms, you stop discovering expired agreements the hard way.
We started with Propper Sign because signing is where the most obvious pain is — both the workflow friction and the cost. But Sign is the entry point, not the destination. Every design decision we've made accounts for what comes before and after the signature, because a signing tool that ignores the rest of the lifecycle is just a nicer pen.
The timing is right
Two things are converging.
AI is making it realistic to automate the parts of the agreement lifecycle that used to be too messy for software. Extracting key clauses. Tracking obligations. Flagging anomalies in contract terms. These aren't demos anymore — they're production features. But they only work when agreement data is structured and accessible, which means they need a platform built for the full lifecycle. Bolting AI onto a signing tool is like putting a turbocharger on a bicycle.
At the same time, buyers are getting tired of first-generation pricing. Per-envelope economics made sense when digital signing felt like magic. They make less sense when it's a commodity and the real value is everything else.
Companies that rethink agreement management from the ground up — not just the signature step — have a structural advantage that's hard to copy by adding features to legacy architecture. The window is open. It won't stay open forever.
Start where the money is
If you're rethinking your agreement stack, start with the tool you're overpaying for. For most mid-market companies, that's eSignature.
Your current tool probably works fine. That's not the question. The question is whether the economics match what you're getting, and whether the platform you're using for signatures today can grow into the platform you need for everything else tomorrow.