Recent commits suggest Signal is preparing a paid subscription for backups.

I imagine this would be backing up to Signal's servers, not restricting local backups? Seems like a harmless way to raise money; I'd wait for a blog post for them to explain their reasoning.

I've been waiting for this feature for a while actually 😅

When I last saw people talking about it, there were rumors that there would be a reasonable free backup (ex. up to 1 Gb) with relatively cheap paid options above that. I scrolled through the GitHub link and couldn't confirm or deny if this is still/actually the case.

Backups are the #1 pain point for friends that tried to switch to Signal, especially for those on iOS. I have a local backup + sync setup for my own phone, but it's a lot to expect for the average casual user to set up.

Whatsapp has backups to Google Drive, which is better than nothing but not ideal. It's time Signal had a reliable backup method for casual users

Heavy sigh

Once again, I will be looking for alternatives to Signal.