Electronic Signature API
Some teams do not want a human clicking through a signing flow — they want a document generated and sent for signature automatically, the moment an order is placed, an account is created, or a milestone is hit in their own product. The Codec Document API is built for exactly that: a company account, API keys, and webhooks that fire when a document status changes.
Manual signing does not scale past a certain volume
A five-person team can manage sending contracts by hand. A product generating fifty signup agreements a day, or an operations team issuing hundreds of vendor confirmations a month, cannot — not without either hiring for the manual work or building the automation themselves against a signing tool that was never designed to be called programmatically. An API-first path removes the ceiling entirely.
What the template covers
Company workspace with role-based API keys
A company account (owner, admin, manager, user roles) issues its own API keys, scoped to that workspace — keys are managed centrally, not tied to one individual's personal login.
Webhooks on document and signature status changes
Subscribe to events — document created, sent, viewed, signed, expired — so your own system reacts the moment something changes, instead of polling for updates.
Programmatic document generation from your data
Send structured data to generate a document from a template, without a human opening the editor — useful for high-volume, repeatable document types like service agreements or NDAs.
The same audit trail as manual signatures
API-triggered signatures carry the identical SHA-256 hash, IP logging and timestamp evidence as a document signed through the standard interface — automation does not reduce the evidentiary standard.
Does an API-triggered signature count the same, legally?
Yes — the ESIGN Act, 15 U.S.C. § 7001, does not distinguish between a signature captured through a manual web flow and one captured through an API-triggered process. What matters legally is that the signature is attributable to the signer and that the record is retained with integrity, both of which the platform's audit trail (identity data, IP address, timestamp, cryptographic hash) preserves regardless of how the signing session was initiated.
A marketplace automating vendor onboarding
An online marketplace onboarding new sellers needed each one to sign a standard vendor agreement before their storefront went live — a manual process that had been creating a two-to-three-day bottleneck between application approval and go-live. By calling the API to generate and send the agreement automatically the moment an application was approved in their own system, and listening for the signed webhook to flip the seller's account to active, the delay dropped to the time it took the vendor to actually read and sign the document — typically under an hour.
Questions people ask about this
Do I need a company account to use the API?
Yes — API access is tied to a company workspace, which also gives you role-based team management and shared branding for anything generated through the API.
What happens if a webhook delivery fails?
The platform retries failed webhook deliveries automatically; you can also poll document status directly through the API as a fallback for any event your endpoint might have missed.
Can I generate documents from data I already have in my own system?
Yes — that is the core use case. You send the structured fields your template needs, and the API returns a generated document ready to send for signature, without anyone opening the manual editor.
Is there a free tier for API usage?
API access is part of the company/business plan rather than the individual free tier — reach out through the pricing page for current usage limits and plan options for your expected volume.