For the first time ever, you can sign up for Signal without handing it your phone number. The private messaging app started rolling out "Signal Login" in its Android 8.28 beta this week, an optional registration method that swaps your digits for an Account ID and a Recovery key. It is the first crack in a rule that has defined Signal since day one: no phone number, no account. Getting Signal without a phone number is not free, though. Signal charges a one-time fee of $2.99 in the United States (€3.49 in Europe, with pricing varying by country), according to the company's GitHub release notes and reporting by Digital Trends.

The idea has been in the works for months. Signal staff engineer Greyson Parrelli detailed the feature in a post on the Signal Community forum on September 16, asking beta testers to try the new flow and report back. Code trackers first spotted hints of numberless registration back in July, and by early September the underlying code had landed in the Android beta. Version 8.28.1, distributed through GitHub and Obtainium, is the build where numberless signup is properly switched on, Parrelli said.

Until now, even as Signal let you hide your number from other users and chat purely through usernames, you still needed a phone number to register. That requirement made Signal an oddity among privacy tools: the app that encrypts everything still asked for the one identifier that ties you to a telecom account. Dropping it, even as an option, is a genuine shift.

The $2.99 is really about spam

Signal is blunt about why the new path costs money. Phone numbers have been its main weapon against abuse. When an account spams people, Signal can kill it, and getting a fresh number costs the spammer something. Remove numbers from the equation and mass account creation becomes nearly free, so Signal replaced the friction of a phone number with the friction of a small payment.

The fee is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Registering with a phone number stays free, and Signal says it has no plans to change that. As a nonprofit, it will put proceeds from numberless signups toward its mission. Payment itself runs through the same zero-knowledge proof system Signal uses for donations, which means there is no direct link between the purchase and the new account. That design is doing real work here: if paying created a paper trail to the account, the privacy gain would be hollow.

The price is not set in stone. Signal has said it could raise the fee if accounts created through Signal Login turn into a meaningful source of spam. The logic is straightforward enough: the fee has to sit above what a spammer is willing to pay per account while staying low enough that ordinary people barely notice it. Keeping Signal without a phone number cheap for real users and expensive for abusers is the whole balancing act.

Signal's leadership has been telegraphing this approach all year. Chief technology officer Ehren Kret said at the FUTO Don't Be Evil conference in March that abuse prevention was the main reason numberless signup did not exist yet, and that a one-time payment was the likely answer. The model even won an early endorsement from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who called it "very welcome" in August, as reported by WebProNews.

The fine print: Google Play is required for now

There is one catch that has annoyed exactly the people most excited about this feature. The first implementation runs through Google Play billing, which means you need Google Play services on your device to buy a numberless account. For users who want Signal without a phone number precisely to reduce their dependence on Google, or who live where SMS verification is blocked, that is an awkward first step. Community members said as much on the forums, and Parrelli acknowledged the current setup will not cover every use case. Signal says it plans to add other payment methods but has given no timeline.

You also have to treat the credentials like crown jewels. When you buy Signal Login, you receive an Account ID and a Recovery key, and those two strings are the only way into the account. The Recovery key doubles as the key for on-device backups and Signal's Secure Backups, even if you turn backups on later. Signal's advice is to store both in a password manager. Lose them and there is no phone number to fall back on for recovery.

Why privacy folks have waited years for this

Phone numbers are useful to carriers and awkward for everyone else. They tie an account to a real-world identity, a billing record, and a physical SIM that attackers have learned to steal through SIM-swap fraud. Governments can and do request subscriber records. SMS interception is still a live attack. Signal's end-to-end encryption protects message contents, but it never protected the fact that your account pointed at your phone number.

That is why the numberless option matters more than the $2.99 price tag suggests. It does not fix every metadata problem; who you talk to and when still leaves patterns. But it removes the single most durable identifier Signal ever collected at signup, and for people in sensitive situations that is a meaningful reduction in exposure. After years of "you still need a number," Signal finally has an answer that is not just hiding the number but skipping it entirely.