Long exposure of fast moving cars

HotDocs has announced a major change to its pricing model. Both users and authors of new HotDocs interviews developed after 2018 will need to switch to a licensing model with monthly recurring charges, at a much higher cost than in the past. Yet, this doesn’t reflect a major reinvestment in or update to the product. HotDocs’ appearance was fresh in 1999 but looks out of place in the modern web. HotDocs’ pricing doesn’t stand alone. Many vendors charge a monthly fee, and that too could change at any time.

An interview in HotDocs. Interface elements are simple, but dated.
A similar interview in Docassemble. Docassemble’s interface is clean and familiar to people who use the modern web.

For legal aid clients especially, HotDocs is turning out to be a risky partner. The past generous discounts for non-profits are looking like vendor lock-in in retrospect.

With Docassemble, you never need to worry about the pricing model changing underneath you. Docassemble is free and open source, with the source code available for anyone to use. Lemma Legal is happy to offer affordable monthly hosting packages as a convenience for you, but you are free to host your document assembly applications on your own servers, too, and you never pay an ongoing license fee.

Choosing Docassemble lets us pass on savings to you. We don’t need to mark up our prices to reflect HotDocs’ license costs.

Are you stuck with a major past investment in HotDocs or another proprietary platform? Docassemble has the features to replace everything you did in HotDocs, and much more. Lemma Legal can help you with your HotDocs conversion projects and make those forms work more efficiently and be easier to use at the same time.

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