Top all-time · #8081
Common Paper
Company blog · commonpaper.com/blog · on HN as jakesteinbusinessstartups
Common Paper is the company blog at commonpaper.com, writing about business and startups. Since 2022, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “Tech Contract Templates (CC-by-4.0): Mutual NDA, TOS, CSA, SLA, PSA, DPA”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Common Paper for its free standard contract templates, such as NDAs, SAFEs and SaaS agreements, drafted by a committee of attorneys. Commenters point to it as a source of open-source legal documents.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Contracts are a team sport. It all starts with a founder working with their first customer to close the deal. Before long, multiple stakeholders need to negotiate, agree on terms, and deliver on what was committed. Common Paper is built to help teams execute on contracts faster. Sign up for free CON
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-26
- /committee2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-24
- Tech Contract Templates (CC-by-4.0): Mutual NDA, TOS, CSA, SLA, PSA, DPA2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-24
- /committee/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-23
What Hacker News says?
https://commonpaper.com/product/ai-agent/
Comment linking /product/ai-agent/
on “Astra for Law”Submitted How to Work with Design Partners as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSolved without AI https://commonpaper.com https://commonpaper.com/standards
Comment linking /standards
on “Astra for Law”Submitted Contract benchmark report – data from >1k companies as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThanks for the mention and kind words! I’m one of the cofounders of Common Paper, happy to answer any questions. Our docs are free, released under creative comments, have been downloaded more than 17,000 times and used to close millions of dollars worth of deals. If you’re not sure what kind of contract you need, this blog post might help: https://commonpaper.com/blog/saas-contracts/
Comment linking /blog/saas-contracts/
on “Ask HN: Where can I find good legal documents?”Submitted The Common Paper API (YC W23) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFor those not familiar: Common Paper https://commonpaper.com/standards/ seems to have the best free standard docs. Here's the post where they describe it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043944 here's another one: https://www.avodocs.com/
Comment linking /standards/
on “Ask HN: Where can I find good legal documents?”Submitted Contracts Should Be APIs as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMy cofounder and I are not lawyers, but we have a great lawyer on our founding team and are advised by many more. https://commonpaper.com/committee/
Comment linking /committee/
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”Submitted Tech Contract Templates (CC-by-4.0): Mutual NDA, TOS, CSA, SLA, PSA, DPA as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTo your point about advice on what the blocks mean, we've started to do two things related to this, and I'd be interested to know if either are close to what you have in mind. 1) We have a language library ( https://commonpaper.com/language-library/ ) of optional sections to add for specific use cases. Most of them don't yet have much context beyond the language itself, but here's a page where we provide an explanat…
Comment linking /standards/mutual-nda/account-mapping
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”I suspect you might enjoy signing an NDA with Vandelay Industries https://app.commonpaper.com/pages/eceaa29b0494074a Great point on optional blocks/special terms. We have a project on the roadmap to make it easier to incorporate entries from the language library into your agreements https://commonpaper.com/language-library/ We're always looking for additional ways to help people understand the agreements and figure…
Comment linking /language-library/
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”There are a few related things here: By making contract review and negotiation faster, we speed up your sales cycle and grow revenue faster. Faster sales cycles mean that you get paid faster, which in turn means that you can recycle cash into new customer acquisition investments and grow faster. We wrote a blog post about the math of how sales cycle speed translates to revenue growth here: https://commonpaper.com/bl…
Comment linking /blog/impact-of-accelerating-sales-cycles/
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”That's a good point, and the magnitude of the impact of speeding up sales cycles can be really surprising if you haven't done the math. We wrote a blog post about this last year with a model in Google Sheets that you can customize for your business, but the TLDR was that while holding everything else constant, moving the sales cycle from 4 month to 3 increases ARR by 46%. That's with the same starting capital. Full…
Comment linking /blog/impact-of-accelerating-sales-cycles/
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”You're correct that we make money by charging for our software. It's free until you use it to close deals with more than 5 customers, and free forever if you're just using it for NDAs. Full details on pricing here: https://commonpaper.com/pricing/ Our target customers are B2B SaaS companies, and our goal is to have them start using us when they are small on the free version and grow with them. I agree that the bigge…
Comment linking /pricing/
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”Pricing page is here: https://commonpaper.com/pricing Small startups don't need contract management until they reach a point and then they wish they started doing it from day 1. :) "hyper-standardized contracts" I suggest you take a look at the app! While our terms are immutable, the contracts can be heavily customized. So instead of hunting down a random word in a PDF you can focus on the things the material change…
Comment linking /pricing
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”Thanks for these questions, taking each in turn: > The process for creating and revising the contracts is modeled after an open-source software project Which Open Source Project? Could you link it please? We didn't model it after a particular open-source project. Rather, we tried to take lessons learned from open-source software projects in general and apply those lessons to the creation and maintenance of the stand…
Comment linking /committee/
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”I really appreciate the kind words, and I totally agree that there will edge cases that the standards don't yet support. Our goal is to gather feedback on things like that (and places where the contracts can be simpler / easier to understand) and incorporate that into future versions. We're always looking for more great attorneys to get involved, and if you have any interest, you can fill out the form on the bottom…
Comment linking /committee
on “Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts”I did happen across a RISC-V component in a slide today, so at least some people are building on a more open system, even if their component is not likely open. https://www.hardware-corner.net/xiaomi-ai-cube-targets-local... Open source as an idea is spreading to other industries, eg. https://commonpaper.com , and I would say (anecdotally) we see more open hardware projects from hobbyists and academics
Comment linking /
on “Anduril BlueChip”During the early stage before you need/can afford a lawyer, use one of the many tools that gives you a good enough template. I've copied a few for me and others from https://commonpaper.com
Comment linking /
on “Startup founders: how do you write your privacy policy?”The Common Paper app[1], though not quite a git workflow, has always struck me as being pretty close to how an software engineer might approach contracts: 1. An immutable set of standard terms, with variable references. 2. A collection of cover page variables, that modify the standard terms by reference. 3. A structured negotiation workflow, where users "propose changes" to the cover page variables with automatic "d…
Comment linking /product/
on “Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts”This one has a handful of contracts: https://commonpaper.com/committee > Agreements are created by a committee of dozens of attorneys representing technology vendors, procurement teams, boutique firms, and Big Law ... Say goodbye to combing through the same clauses over and over and hello to structured, easily negotiated agreements that get everyone on the same page There were also some open-source term sheets, this…
Comment linking /committee
on “Ask HN: Open-Source Legal Documents?”Size ratio methodology: I measured 25 .docx templates from Common Paper ( https://commonpaper.com ) and Bonterms ( https://bonterms.com ) — open-source standard agreement templates anyone can download. I excluded our own templates to avoid cherry-picking. Short-form templates (amendments, term sheets) skew the high end because they're mostly formatting with little text; the median is representative of typical multi-…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: safe-docx lets coding agents edit Word docs without breaking formatting”https://commonpaper.com/committee > Agreements are created by a committee of dozens of attorneys representing technology vendors, procurement teams, boutique firms, and Big Law ... Say goodbye to combing through the same clauses over and over and hello to structured, easily negotiated agreements that get everyone on the same page.
Comment linking /committee
on “Tech Contract Templates (CC-by-4.0): Mutual NDA, TOS, CSA, SLA, PSA, DPA”
