Michael Luo didn’t raise funding, didn’t hire a team, and didn’t spend months in stealth. He sat down one weekend, opened a few AI tools, and built Inkless, a fully functional e-signature platform that lets users send, sign, and track contracts at no cost. It took him two days and costs him around $20 a month to run.
Within a week of launch, he received a legal warning from DocuSign.
The $15 billion e-signature giant accused him of infringing on its intellectual property and making “false and misleading” statements about its platform. The cease-and-desist letter, sent directly to Luo, warned that DocuSign considered the matter “very serious” and demanded immediate action to take down the product.
I got a cease and desist from DocuSign for my free SaaS.
— Michael Luo (@AzianMike) June 19, 2025
A couple of months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?”
Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to… pic.twitter.com/riURobOC3A
The $15 billion e-signature giant accused him of infringing on its intellectual property and making “false and misleading” statements about its platform. The cease-and-desist letter, sent directly to Luo, warned that DocuSign considered the matter “very serious” and demanded immediate action to take down the product.
Luo had anticipated some pushback, but not this level of escalation. “I don’t know anything about DocuSign’s code,” he said on the Talking AI podcast. “I just wanted to see how easy or hard it is to create an e-signing tool with AI.”
What he discovered and what DocuSign’s response confirms is that much of what passes for modern SaaS can now be rebuilt by a single person, using AI, in under a weekend. The idea for Inkless came after Luo saw a post by investor Andrew Wilkinson, who complained about how expensive DocuSign had become for something that felt so commoditized.
“I had used DocuSign before and liked it,” Luo said, “but I would agree it’s a little on the pricier side. That kind of inspired me.”
I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped.
— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) February 20, 2025
What's the best alternative? Is there something free or stupid cheap?
From prompt to product
What makes Inkless remarkable isn’t just that it works but that it was built by one person using off-the-shelf AI tools.
“I think what these AI tools have product-market fit for is creating prototypes,” he said. “Whether you believe that’s slop or not, that’s your opinion. But I personally believe prototypes are valuable. They’re how we get to something production-ready.”
Luo started with Lovable, a no-code interface that generates app skeletons from natural language descriptions. Once he had a rough frontend scaffold, he moved into ChatGPT for iteration. Specifically, he used GPT-4 (1106 version), which he described as the best performing model for his needs. Since his preferred IDE, Cursor, didn’t support GPT-4-1106 under its standard plan, he would often copy and paste the generated code from Cursor back into ChatGPT’s interface for more detailed help.
“I try to give it very detailed prompts,” he explained. “I start by saying: ‘This is the app I’m building. These are the current capabilities. Here’s what’s missing. Here’s what users want. Here’s the solution I’m imagining. Help me build this feature.’”
Using this workflow, he added critical functionality: user authentication, email delivery with secure links, audit logs for compliance, and real-time signature notifications. A single new feature could be developed, tested, and deployed in just a couple of hours.
Nearly every line of code came from AI. “Pretty much 99% of my code is AI-generated,” Luo said. “I just shape it, test it, and glue it all together.”
Luo calls this new model “vibe coding” building by prompting, iterating, and course-correcting, rather than writing logic from scratch. Each week, he gets feature requests. Each week, he adds what he can usually within hours. One request, for example, was for drag-and-drop repositioning of signature fields. He added it using a single prompt.
“There’s no team,” he said. “I’m the product manager, the engineer, the designer, and the support desk.”
And in just two days, the result was a free, working alternative to DocuSign.
Why the reaction was so swift
DocuSign didn’t accuse Luo of copying source code or UI elements. The core of its complaint was reputational harm. The idea that Inkless was making unfair comparisons to DocuSign’s product, particularly regarding pricing.
This reflects a broader shift in how incumbents are responding to AI-built tools. Lovable, the AI-powered app builder that Luo used to initially generate Inkless’s interface, was previously hit with a warning from Figma over its use of the phrase “Dev Mode,” triggering a trademark dispute. DocuSign’s response suggests a similar pattern where large companies defending not just technology, but market positioning.
But Luo isn’t trying to steal market share. “I don’t imagine Nike using my app,” he said. “I think DocuSign probably has a much better enterprise sales motion, a much better enterprise brand, and a full customer success team. I’m not building for Fortune 500s.”
Inkless was never meant to replace DocuSign for regulated industries or global procurement teams. Instead, it targets independent professionals, small teams, and individuals who need basic e-signature workflows without enterprise overhead.
That distinction hasn’t stopped the controversy. Luo’s TikTok video about Inkless went semi-viral, racking up over 250,000 views and thousands of likes. The comment section exploded into debate. One camp rallied around Inkless as a symbol of software democratization. Another dismissed it as fragile and insecure.
“There’s a new term people started using which is Temuware,” Luo said, referencing the e-commerce platform known for low-cost knockoffs. “The implication being: this is just a cheap clone. But I think that misses the point.”
Inkless might not be as robust as DocuSign but that’s not the point. It’s a working demonstration that many SaaS workflows are vulnerable to automation, commoditization, and replication.
The pricing model, Luo argues, is due for a shakeup. “At the end of the day, it’s a form with a few fields and a PDF renderer,” one commenter wrote. “Why does that cost $100 a month?
“Companies are starting to demand more integration, lower complexity, and less fragmented tooling,” he said. “The shift is from paying per user to paying for the hard stuff — compliance, governance, security.”
Tools like Inkless and the process used to build them are revealing just how much of traditional SaaS is essentially CRUD operations with UX layers. “E-signing tools aren’t super hard,” he said. “As long as you pay attention to the letter of the law, especially in the U.S., it’s doable.”
But AI still has major limitations. Luo highlighted three: short context windows, lack of memory about product decisions, and poor debugging capabilities. “Sometimes the AI can feel like a senior engineer, and sometimes it’s dumb as a rock,” he said. “I had to coach it to debug its own mistakes.”
He shared one example where a feature broke due to a silent failure in the backend. “The AI wrote the bug, then couldn’t fix it. I had to go in, add manual logging, run the test, copy all the logs back in, and then it could help.”
Luo says the hosting costs remain low, and the feature roadmap is driven directly by user requests. “It’s me doing all of it. I talk to users, decide what to build, write the prompts, test the code, deploy the feature. And I still only spend about two to four hours a week.”
He doesn’t plan to commercialize Inkless immediately. Nor is he abandoning it. He’s continuing to add features, maintain compliance, and share learnings publicly.
That question may be what DocuSign fears most.
Because if one person can build a working version of your product in 48 hours and thousands of people start using it the problem may not be infringement.
It may be relevance.
