You have decided to sign a founder agreement. Good. Now you have three doors: a free template, a lawyer, or a platform. I have spent years on the lawyer side of that question, so let me give you the answer I would give a friend.
The template first. It costs nothing and it exists everywhere, which is why it is the most common choice. It is also the option I met most often in litigation, and rarely in a good way. A template gives you clauses, but it does not ask you questions. It does not know that one of you is still employed, that the other already wrote half the code before you met, that your equity split assumes a commitment nobody defined. The dangerous part of a template is not what it contains. It is what it lets you skip. Two founders can fill one in an evening without ever having the one conversation the document was supposed to force.
The lawyer next, and I will be honest even though it is my own profession. A good startup lawyer is the right answer more often than founders think: complex cap tables, existing IP entanglements, a corporate investor at the table, anything unusual. If your situation has real edges, pay for real advice. The limits are practical. Most early teams meet the lawyer after incorporation, which is often after the facts that needed settling. The engagement produces an excellent document, priced accordingly, and then the relationship pauses. The PDF goes into a drive. Eighteen months later, half of it no longer matches reality, and nobody calls the lawyer to update a document they already paid four figures for.
The platform is the third door, and since I built one, discount my bias as you read. What a well-built platform does is sit between the two: it asks the questions the template skips, in plain language, and it produces a signed agreement without the invoice that makes early teams postpone the whole subject. What it adds, and this is the part I care about, is what happens after the signature: amendments when life changes, a record of what was decided and when, an agreement that stays true instead of drifting into fiction.
So: unusual situation, take the lawyer, sincerely. Simple situation and no budget, even a template beats nothing, if you force yourselves to actually discuss it. But if what you want is the conversation made easy, the signature made real, and the agreement kept alive, that is the job platforms were built to do.
Whichever door you choose, choose one this month. The worst option is the fourth one: none, while the work compounds.