The registration is only available on Android for now and costs a one-time fee of $2.99. The fee is meant to make it financially infeasible for spammers to create thousands of accounts and ruin Signal's network.
The payment is currently only offered through Play Services, but more payment methods are planned for the future. This means that users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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so now instead of just your phone number, now they have a LOT of other info about you. Makes sense. Privacy!
It only costs $2.99.
I'll happily pay when they accept either crypto or an envelope of cash. There is no way to separate electronic payments or transfers from my personal identity and I don't consider it usefully "private" to have any account directly traceable to that. Trust is a limited and increasingly valuable commodity, and I'm conserving mine.
That said, there's probably a decent opportunity for second hand, no-strings-attached accounts to now be legitimately purchased then laundered anonymously through an arbitrary middleman without having use burner accounts stolen from innocent people or created with stolen identities. So maybe that'll be an improvement for privacy. Privacy shouldn't have to be illegal or inconvenient (but of course they want it to be).
It really isn't that hard to create an anonymous Google account and add some credit or use prepaid cards.
It really isn't that hard to accept crypto and cash in envelopes as payment.
Why would you send digital money physically?
And it's one-time payment.
My card is ready! When I can on graphene
… users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.
Just yet is better than not at all, I think.
Yeah? That's what I was saying. I'll pay when I can on graphene
What in the absolute fuck. Signal disappoints again.
…just yet.
Honestly it should be their highest priority to make shit available without Google spyware. It's truly stunning.
You have to start somewhere, and it makes sense to start with their largest user base and move downwards.
Disagree. It make sense to start with your most vulnerable users.
How about an open source server implementation? How about federation of servers? This fixes nothing. I'm still on XMPP.
Awesome. Tested and works great.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Signal has so many red flags. You are required to have a phone number which is essentially ur real identity. They now have payments linked to real identities so much better. They used to federate with 3rd party servers but they killed that and all but wiped it from the internet. They try to shut down 3rd party clients. They don't provide reproducible builds so we can't trust the source. They received their initial funding from In-Q-Tel the CIA venture capital firm.
Every time someone tries to raise any of these issues they are immediately shut down and told that its all for a good reason and that we should trust it.
At minimum they have a full social graph of real identities with time-stamped message events. Sealed sender doesn't negate this as signal knows ur ip address when u give them a message. They also know the destination of that message as that isn't sealed. This is sufficient information to link sender and recipient and timestamp. That's assuming the unreproducible builds don't have backdoors.
It's all got a slightly fishy smell to it.
Tldr: If u want actual secure messaging u should consider SimpleX
I think protocol wise xmpp is the best, it however doesn't have full clients on every operating system( something simplex appears to share) for that reason I have had to open my threat vectors up to allow software from corporate America, which in my opinion signal is the cherry on top of the shit sunday.
Olvid is another option.
All you need is a major credit card and Google Play. Privacy is secured.
Threema ftw