Sign is launching its first paid characteristic: the flexibility to make safe, end-to-end encrypted backups of your media historical past older than 45 days and of your textual content message historical past for $1.99 per thirty days.
“Media requires a whole lot of storage, and storing and transferring massive quantities of knowledge is dear,” Sign’s VP of engineering, Jim O’Leary, says in a blog post. “As a nonprofit that refuses to gather or promote your knowledge, Sign must cowl these prices in a different way than different tech organizations that supply comparable merchandise however assist themselves by promoting advertisements and monetizing knowledge.”
Sign can also be launching free safe backups that save your media from simply the final 45 days. On that free tier, you’ll additionally have the ability to save your textual content messages previous then, and whilst you’ll be restricted to saving 100MB of messages, Sign expects that may nonetheless “be massive sufficient for even heavy Sign customers to again up the textual content of all of their messages,” in response to O’Leary.
The backup archives are “saved with no direct hyperlink to a selected backup fee or Sign person account,” O’Leary says. You’ll use a restoration key to unlock your backups, however when you lose that key, the corporate “can not assist you get well it.” In the event you activate safe backups, your system will make a brand new backup each day.
The characteristic is out there on Android’s beta app, and a public launch and iOS and desktop assist are “coming quickly.” Down the road, Sign plans to let customers save a safe backup archive to “the placement of your selecting.”