We built the CLA tool we always needed

The pattern was always the same: engineering wanted to accept an external PR, legal needed a signed CLA first, and nobody had a clean record of who had signed what version. The OSPO — when one existed — was the triage point, working through email threads and attached PDFs to reconstruct a signature history before any M&A due diligence or IP audit.

The existing tooling had a clear gap. SAP's CLA Assistant was (and remains) free and self-hosted — it handled basic signature collection but had no compliance dashboard, no audit export, and required DevOps time to run. On the other end, full FOSS compliance platforms like Fossa bundled CLA into a much larger license-scanning product with enterprise-only pricing. Teams that just needed the CLA piece had nowhere to go.

Cohorto is not a license scanner. It does one thing: automate contributor license agreement collection and maintain the audit-ready record of every signature. It integrates natively with the version control platforms your team already uses, at a price that fits before the enterprise compliance budget materializes.