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Sending an NDA

Before you start

You need a FreshNDA account and an organization. If you don’t have one yet, sign up and you’ll be guided through creating an organization during setup.

Choose how to share it

Go to your dashboard and click Send NDA. First pick how to share it:

  • Send by email—send the NDA straight to one or more recipients’ inboxes.
  • Share a link—get a reusable link anyone can use to review and sign. See Reusable NDA Links for more.

Pick a template and recipient

Choosing Send by email brings up the template picker and the recipient fields together on one screen:

  1. Template—pick which NDA to send. FreshNDA uses Bonterms NDA templates: the built-in system templates plus any custom templates your admins have created. The templates you used most recently show up first, and the picker defaults to your last-used one. Once you have more than five, a search box appears so you can filter by name to find the right one fast.
  2. Recipient email—the person who will receive and sign the NDA. To send the same NDA to several people at once, click + Add recipient for each one (up to 10). Each recipient gets their own separate NDA to sign, and all of them appear in your History. If an address looks like a common typo (for example gmial.com), the form suggests a correction you can apply in one click before sending.

Your name, email, title, and organization are pre-filled from your account. You can edit them before sending.

On every plan, admins can set the five Key Terms—Purpose, Term of NDA, Confidentiality Period, Governing Law, and Courts—on the built-in templates from the template detail page, so you can pick your own governing law and courts without going custom. Those values are frozen onto each NDA at send. On paid plans, admins can also create custom templates from scratch or by duplicating an existing one, and can edit a single NDA’s text at send time. Those send-time edits are kept if you go back to the share method or reload the page, so a stray click won’t lose your wording; they clear once you send or reset to the template. See Billing & Plans for details.

Don’t see a template you expected? An admin may have hidden it from the send menu. Admins can hide any template they aren’t using from its editor, on any plan, so the picker stays short. At least one template always stays visible.

Preview and send

After filling in the form, click Preview NDA to see the full agreement with both parties’ details filled in. The recipient’s signature line shows an “Awaiting signature” placeholder until they sign. Review it, then:

  • Click Back to return to the form and make changes.
  • Click Send NDA to deliver the NDA to the recipient’s email.

If anyone in your organization already has an active NDA out to that recipient’s email (sent, opened, or partially signed and not yet expired), a Possible duplicate note appears above the Send button, showing who sent the earlier one, when, and its status. It’s a heads-up, not a block, so an intentional second NDA still goes through.

When you send to several recipients at once and they all go out, you land on your History with each NDA listed. If some of them don’t send (for example, you reach the daily send limit partway through), a Partly sent panel stays on screen instead, naming each recipient who didn’t go out and why. A Retry the N that didn’t send button re-sends just those addresses using the same template and settings, so you don’t have to re-enter anyone.

Track your NDA

After sending, you’re taken to a status page that updates in real time. You’ll see a timeline showing each step:

  1. Sent—the NDA was handed off to the email provider for delivery. When the recipient’s mail server confirms receipt, this step updates to show Email delivered; if the message can’t be delivered it shows Email bounced instead, and you’re emailed about the bounce so you can correct the address or resend without watching the page. “Sent” means handed off, not confirmed received—the two are tracked separately.
  2. Viewed—the recipient opened the signing page.
  3. Signed—the recipient signed. Both parties receive a PDF.

Each NDA’s signing link is valid for 7 days from when you send it—the detail page shows the exact expiry date and time. You can resend it any time before then to nudge the recipient. If it expires unsigned, the recipient sees an expired-link message and the NDA moves to your Expired filter; send a new NDA to try again.

Steps that haven’t happened yet are shown in muted text with a label like Not viewed or Not signed, so it’s clear what’s still outstanding.

If the recipient declines instead of signing, the NDA is marked Declined and can no longer be signed. You get a notification email (with the recipient’s reason, if they added one), and declined NDAs have their own filter in your History.

The status page refreshes automatically every 30 seconds. You can also find all your NDAs in the History tab of your dashboard. There you can search by recipient name or email, filter by status, and narrow the list to a window of send dates with the From and To pickers (for example, everything you sent last week). A running Showing X of N count tells you how many NDAs match your current filters.

Each row has a quick-actions menu for the common follow-ups, so you don’t have to open the detail page. A pending NDA offers Resend signing email and Send reminder; a signed one offers Download signed PDF. The reminder cooldown and resend limit still apply, so if you try too soon the reason is shown right there.

From History you can also download the signed PDFs in bulk. Export signed PDFs zips every executed NDA in the current date range into a single archive. If the range is small enough, the download starts right away. If it covers more documents than can be packaged in one download, the archive is built in the background instead and a private download link is emailed to you when it’s ready. That link expires after 3 days.

Cancel an NDA

If the recipient hasn’t signed yet, you can cancel the NDA from its status page. Click Cancel NDA and confirm. You can add an optional reason, which is recorded with the cancellation. The recipient’s signing link will stop working immediately.

Right after you send, the status page shows a Sent to [recipient] banner at the top with a Wrong recipient? Cancel this NDA prompt, so a message sent to the wrong address can be pulled back on the spot without digging through your history.

On a team, the cancellation is attributed to the member who made it, shown on the NDA’s detail page and in the CSV export. Cancelling several NDAs at once from the history list is limited to organization admins; any member can still cancel a single NDA from its detail page.

Google Drive export

An organization admin can connect Google Drive so that a copy of every signed NDA is automatically saved to a Google Drive folder you choose. Open Settings and, under Google Drive, choose Connect Google Drive, then pick the destination folder.

  • Admin only. Only an admin can connect Drive, change the folder, or disconnect it.
  • Opt-in, and it covers every signed NDA. Once connected, every NDA that becomes fully signed is exported to the folder. There is no per-NDA toggle.
  • Limited access. FreshNDA uses Google’s narrow drive.file scope, so it can only see and add the files it creates in your Drive, never the rest of your Drive.
  • Disconnecting keeps existing files. Turning Drive off, or deleting your organization, stops future exports but does not remove copies already saved to your Drive. Manage those in Google Drive yourself.