Vertical SaaS
Make contracts a native part of your platform.
Contract infrastructure is the layer a software platform embeds so its business users can produce and execute agreements without leaving the product. You supply the data and the surface; Conovo supplies template setup, field binding, deterministic generation, validation and dispatch for signature, all under your brand, with your users never signing up for a second product.
Your platform already holds the parties, the amounts, the dates and the scope. The contract is the one artefact that leaves your product to get made somewhere else.
The pattern
Same shape, different industry nouns.
If your product knows the record, it knows the contract.
Vertical platforms differ enormously in domain and barely at all in this respect: each stores a central record, and each has users who send an agreement about that record. The agreement is where the platform’s data stops and a Word document starts.
| Platform | The record you already store | What your users send about it |
|---|---|---|
| Wealth & investment platforms | the client account and its fee arrangement | advisory agreements, IMAs, fee schedules |
| Construction & contractor software | the job, its scope and its schedule of values | subcontracts, change orders, lien waivers |
| Staffing & recruiting systems | the placement, the rate and the client | placement agreements, terms of business |
| Professional services tools | the project, its deliverables and its fee | engagement letters, statements of work |
| Insurance platforms | the policy, the insureds and the coverage | producer agreements, binders, endorsements |
| Logistics software | the lane, the carrier and the rate | carrier agreements, rate confirmations |
Not listed? The qualification test is the middle column: if your product stores the facts the agreement needs, the fit holds regardless of industry.
Why it stalls
The honest reason this isn’t shipped yet.
Contracts are the feature your roadmap keeps postponing.
Not because it is unimportant, since customers ask for it constantly, but because it is a large piece of infrastructure that does not differentiate your product and has to be right on the first document it produces.
- Formatting is the whole game. Generating a document that keeps clause numbering, tables and styling exactly is far harder than generating one that reads correctly.
- The field model runs out. Substitution handles names and dates, then the first payment schedule or conditional clause arrives and the model needs rewriting.
- Wrong is worse than missing. A contract sent with the wrong number is a commercial incident, so the validation layer is not optional and nobody scoped it.
- It never finishes. Signature integration, retries, audit trail, template versioning, reproducibility of a document signed two years ago: the tail is longer than the build.
Your side
What the integration asks of you.
Three things, then it is a feature you own.
Register your payload schema
One JSON sample of the record contracts are about. Append-only versions, so extending it never breaks a template bound to an earlier one.
Mint sessions from your server
A short-lived token per signed-in business, minted with @conovo/node. Your secret key never reaches a browser, and workspace scope comes from the token rather than the request.
Mount the components
Template setup where settings live, sending where deals live, an inbox where your users track status. Themed with CSS custom properties so they read as your product, not an embed.
Questions
From platform product and engineering leads.
Common questions.
What is contract infrastructure for vertical SaaS?
Contract infrastructure is the layer a software platform embeds so the businesses using it can produce and execute agreements without leaving the product. The platform supplies the data and the user interface surface; the infrastructure supplies template setup, field binding, deterministic generation, validation and dispatch for signature. The businesses never sign up for a second product, and the platform does not build a document pipeline.
Why does this keep getting postponed on platform roadmaps?
Because it is large, unglamorous, and adjacent to the product rather than part of it. Document generation that preserves formatting, a field model expressive enough for formulas and conditional clauses, a validation layer, signature integration, an audit trail, versioning and reproducibility: none of it differentiates the platform, all of it has to be right, and it competes with roadmap items that customers ask for by name.
How much of the contract fills automatically?
It depends on how much of the agreement your platform's schema already covers, and it is measurable rather than promised: after a template is confirmed, Conovo reports how many of its fields fill automatically and which ones do not. Fields that cannot resolve are reported as payload gaps in the console, so the path to a higher rate is a concrete list rather than a guess.
Do we need per-business setup?
Each business sets up its own templates from its own contracts, because their agreements genuinely differ, which is usually why they are on a vertical platform rather than a horizontal one. What you can do is publish a curated starter template that any business on your platform can adopt in one click, which covers the businesses that do not have a contract of their own.
What does the integration actually involve?
Registering a payload schema, adding a server route that mints a session token with the Node SDK, and mounting React components where contracts belong in your product. Scope comes from the token, never the request, so you never pass a workspace identifier to a component and cannot accidentally cross tenants.
How does billing work between us and our customers?
Conovo bills the platform; the businesses on your product never see an invoice, a signup screen, or our name. What you charge them for contracts, if anything, is entirely your decision and never appears in our billing.
Next
Put contracts where the work already happens.
Evaluate it directly: the generation API, template setup, embedded signing, and what it costs.