Comparison
version90 vs Google Drive + email
This is the real incumbent. Not Ironclad — nobody reading this lost a deal to Ironclad. The competition is a shared drive named Legal, an inbox, and the working assumption that everyone will be careful forever.
And look — it's free, everyone knows it, and it almost works. "Almost" is doing heavy lifting. Drive knows your contract is a file; it doesn't know it's a contract. It can't tell you the current version, what changed since Tuesday, whose turn it is, or that clause 9 quietly lost its liability cap in round four. Email, meanwhile, is a version control system where the merge strategy is scrolling.
Enterprise software solved all this a decade ago and priced small businesses out of the solution. That's the actual scandal — and the reason version90 costs what a team lunch costs.
| version90 | Drive + email | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $100 | $0 (visible) · unbounded (invisible) |
| Current version | Unambiguous — the system says so | Sociological consensus, renegotiated weekly |
| Change detection | Every insertion/deletion listed; sneaky edits caught | Whatever tracked changes their lawyer left on |
| Who agreed to this clause? | Attributed decision log | A subpoena-grade inbox excavation |
| What did we sign in 2023? | Archive search, extracted terms | Ctrl+F across PDFs, vibes, and the memory of whoever's left |
| Renewal surprises | Extracted dates & auto-renewal flags | The invoice is the notification system |
| AI review | Cited findings on every draft | Pasting clauses into a chatbot and hoping |
| Internal notes leaking to counterparty | Structurally impossible | One misclicked Forward away, forever |
The invisible invoice
The Drive stack bills annually, in incidents: the auto-renewal discovered by invoice (list price: one year of a vendor you meant to fire), the untracked edit that surfaced during a dispute, the afternoon three people spent reconstructing "what we actually agreed to" from attachments. Any one of those costs more than a decade of version90. You just never see them on the same ledger, so "free" keeps winning the meeting.
Frequently asked questions
What's actually wrong with managing contracts in Google Drive and email?
Nothing — until money is involved. Drive and email have no concept of a version chain, a turn, an approval, or a term. Every one of those becomes a human process, and human processes fail at the worst moments: the untracked edit you missed, the auto-renewal you found via invoice, the 'FINAL' file that wasn't.
We're small — do we really need contract software?
You need it precisely because you're small: there's no legal department downstream to catch what slips. If your agreements are trivial and few, stay with Drive honestly. If a single missed clause or renewal would cost more than $1,200, the math has already decided.
Do we have to migrate everything at once?
No. Start with the next contract that lands in your inbox — one drag-and-drop. Backfill the archive folder whenever; extraction does the cataloging for you.
Does version90 replace email with counterparties?
No — it embraces it. Counterparties keep emailing Word files; version90 turns that chaos into a version history on your side. You quit email archaeology without asking anyone else to change.
In witness whereof
Your next contract could be the last one you email around.
One plan, $100/month, every feature. Your first contract can be under review in about ninety seconds.