According to their FAQ page the contract templates/UI are free, with their business model being based on their escrow services - which are not being offered publicly yet.

I believe that its going to take them quite some time to start offering escrow services, due to the strict escrow regulation and the (very high!) costs associated with that. My bet is that they won't offer it until after raising their Series A.

I remember balancedpayments had an escrow feature. Perhaps they could use another 3rd party service to accomplish this?

Indeed, escrow is highly regulated in some states, including CA. There are a few third party services that provide an API for escrow among other things: http://www.armorpayments.com/ and http://promisepay.com/.

Stripe and Braintree can also support some versions of escrow, depending on how long you want to hold the money for and the amount.

One of the makers of Bonsai here. Thanks for checking us out!

- Agree re email. Reason we did that is we realized most people don't have the need to create a contract immediately, and unless they bookmark us, they may not remember "that cool website that does my contracts for me..." Providing the sample contract + other relevant educational material in the meantime to stay top of mind was the best short term way to do that.

- Regarding transaction fee, right now we're really only looking at escrow, which depending on the transaction size and deal we're able to get from the third party escrow provider, it should be somewhere around 2-5%.

Re: email I did the opposite. I was ready to view it now, but waiting for an email turned me off. So I tweeted it instead and hope I remember to go back to my tweet. And, there's a part of me that says, in a nice way, "you haven't earned my email yet."

Still, I love the idea and actually want to find a reason to use it.

Thanks for this. It couldn't have been more timely!

No kidding, I have my first meeting with a potential client in an hour, and last night I was thinking in my head "How do I even talk about guaranteeing payment?" and then I see this when I woke up.

Thanks for building it!

I see what you did there. You might be able to a/b test what's converting better because you might loose some people entirely because they don't want to give away their email without first seeing a sample and then forget about it anyway. Thanks for the info about the fee, I definitely bookmarked your service for later use ;).