> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.contracts.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Redlines and the room
> How a contract with two sides behaves: each change marked, each acceptance recorded, and the other side never pays.
**This page states rules, not release notes.** These are the rules the product
is built to, and they hold wherever you meet it. Guest signing is being built,
and nothing here is a claim about what shipped on any particular day. Where a
page can only describe a rule, it says so rather than borrowing a tense it has
not earned.
## Contract first, room second
A contract is the object. A single contract with a link to it is first-class —
you do not have to make a workspace to send one piece of paper.
The **room** materialises when there is more than one contract, or when somebody
else is invited. It is the same surface with a wrapper: an overview, the
contracts in it, and the people on them.
## The other side never makes an account
They open the paper in a browser, reply to a clause and put their name to it. No
account to make, no fee to pay, nothing to install.
This is a product rule and not a pricing tier. The person you are contracting
with is not our customer, and asking them to become one to read what you sent
them is a tax on your deal.
## A round is sent all at once
Proposals sit on your side until you send them. The other side sees a set of
changes, once, the way a marked-up draft arrives in an email — not a live cursor
travelling through their contract while they read it.
That is how contracts are actually negotiated, and an unsent reply never blocks
agreement on anything else. It is private until it is sent: the other side cannot
see your staged decisions, count them, or be told they exist.
## Each change is marked, each acceptance is recorded
A change arrives drawn as a change: the struck words quiet, the arriving words
underlined, a bar in the margin. No red and green — the ink ramp does the work,
because a contract is not a diff view.
Every acceptance is recorded against the version it was made on, so the history
**is** the document rather than a mailbox you have to reassemble afterwards.
## Words never move by proposal alone
There is no call, button, key or agent that writes clause text directly. A
**Proposal** names a block, the words before and the words after, and a reason. The
other side answers it with a **Decision** — accept, reject or counter. Only then do
the words move.
Each move is snapshotted as a **Version**: the blocks, the governing law, and a hash
of the exact words. A signature binds to that hash, never to "the contract" as a
moving object.
That is the whole mechanism behind the next page.
Blocks, asks and decisions, the four signature states, and two questions that are
still open.
Agreeing to the terms and putting your name to them are two acts.