About Penstead

Penstead is a document preparation and electronic signature service. You fix a document — edit the text, redact what shouldn’t be there, merge in the attachments, fill in the form — and then send it to the people who have to sign it, without moving between two tools to do it.

Who builds it

One person: Soren Iverson. There is no team, no sales department, and no support queue behind a chatbot. That is worth saying plainly rather than writing “we” and letting you assume otherwise, because it tells you what to expect — replies come from the person who wrote the code, and there is no tier of the product where you get a different answer.

Penstead is early. It has more users than it has months of existence, which is not many of either. If that matters for what you are about to send, it should factor in — and the status page is public, monitored from outside our own infrastructure, and shows the outages as well as the uptime.

Where your document actually goes

Most of what Penstead does never uploads your file. Editing, merging, splitting, organising, cropping, compressing, OCR, redaction, form filling and signing something yourself all run inside the browser tab — the bytes never reach a server, which is a property of how it is built rather than a policy we promise to keep.

Three things do use a server, and they are the three we charge for once you do enough of them: converting Office files to PDF (converted and discarded immediately, never stored), share links, and signature requests — where the document has to be stored so the other party can open it. The privacy policy says which feature is which, and pricing shows every limit.

What you get with a signature

Every completed request comes back as the signed PDF with a Certificate of Completion: who signed, the address each link went to, when each person opened and signed it, their IP address, and SHA-256 hashes of both the original and the signed bytes. Signers never create an account. Sending is free 5 times a month.

Penstead is not a law firm and none of this is legal advice. Whether an electronic signature suits a particular document depends on the document and on where you are; the terms set out what we do and do not stand behind.

Reaching a person

The contact form reaches the person who builds this. A published address is coming with the mailbox behind it; a mailbox that bounces would be worse than none, so it is not printed here until it demonstrably works.