How to sign a PDF on iPhone without a subscription

Almost every “how to sign a PDF on your iPhone” article ends the same way: download this app, start a free trial, subscribe. That’s not what you asked. You want to sign a document without adding another monthly charge to your Apple account.

Good news: you can, and the tool is already on your phone. Here’s the honest version — what’s free forever, what’s free-with-a-catch, and how to tell the difference before you install anything.

The genuinely free route: Apple Markup

Markup is Apple’s built-in annotation tool. It’s part of iOS, it costs nothing, there’s no account, no trial, and no upsell — and it can put a signature on a PDF.

Open the PDF. In Mail, tap the attachment. In Files, tap the file to preview it.
Tap the Markup icon — the pencil tip in a circle, usually top-right.
Tap + (bottom-right) → Signature.
Tap Add or Remove Signature → +, draw your signature with a finger, and tap Done.
Your signature drops onto the page. Drag it to the line and use the blue corner handles to resize it.
Need a date or a name in a box? Tap + → Text, type, and drag it into place.
Tap Done, then share the signed copy — in Mail it offers to attach it to a reply directly.

That’s it. No subscription, no purchase, no expiry. Markup saves the signature you drew, so the next document is faster. If your signing life is a lease once a year and a school form each autumn, stop here — you’re finished, and you don’t need anything else on this page. We wrote a fuller comparison of Apple Markup as a signing tool if you want to know exactly where its limits are.

Two things Markup genuinely cannot do, so you’re not surprised later: it won’t reflow or edit the actual text of a PDF, and if a PDF is password-protected you’ll need to unlock it first — signing a password-protected PDF on iPhone covers that case.

”Free” web signing tools: free per document, paid in other ways

Search this question and you’ll be pushed toward browser tools — the upload-your-PDF-and-sign-it-in-a-tab kind. They do work, and the first document is usually free. Two things worth knowing before you use one:

Your document goes to their server. You’re uploading a lease, a contract or a medical form to a company you’ve never heard of, where it sits until their retention window expires. For a restaurant menu, fine. For anything with your address, salary or signature on it, that’s a real decision, not a technicality.
The free tier is a funnel. Two or three documents a day, then a wall — and the wall is a subscription. You haven’t avoided the subscription; you’ve delayed meeting it.

If all you want from a website is the signature image rather than the signing, that part can honestly be free and stay free: our free signature generator draws or types your signature in the browser and downloads a transparent PNG. Nothing is uploaded, there’s no signup, and the file is yours to drop into Markup, Preview, Word or anything else. That’s a tool, not a trial.

Adobe’s free tier

Adobe Acrobat Reader’s Fill & Sign is free and will sign a PDF on an iPhone. The catch isn’t money, it’s the account: you sign in, the app is large, and it advertises the paid tier persistently while you use it. If you’re already an Adobe user it’s a reasonable free option. If the account is the thing you’re avoiding, signing a PDF on iPhone without Adobe walks the alternatives.

How to spot a subscription before you install

This is the part nobody tells you, and it takes ten seconds. On any App Store listing, scroll to the Information section at the bottom and look at In-App Purchases. It lists every purchase in the app with its price, and it’s Apple’s data, not the developer’s marketing:

Entries reading “$X.99 / month” or ”/ year” — that’s a subscription, regardless of what the screenshots say.
A single entry with a plain price and no interval — that’s a one-time unlock.
No In-App Purchases section at all — either genuinely free, or paid up front.

“Free” at the top of a listing only describes the download. The Information section describes what happens after. And if you ever do subscribe to something, Settings → your name → Subscriptions is where you cancel it, not inside the app.

Where Signed sits, plainly

We make an iPhone signing app, so here’s the straight answer rather than a sales pitch: Signed is a subscription — $39.99/year (about $3.33/month, starting with a 3-day free trial) or $9.99/month. There’s no way around that, and if you searched for this specifically to avoid a subscription, you should use Markup. That’s a real recommendation, not a rhetorical move.

What you get for it, if you decide the free route isn’t enough: a signature you create once — drawn properly, typed in a real handwriting style, or AI-generated — and reuse identically on every document; initials and today’s date as one tap each rather than hand-placed text boxes; and a flattened PDF out the other end. Everything stays on your device, with no cloud copy. Your first signature is free during setup, so you see the flow before paying. The full cost breakdown is on how much Signed costs.

The honest threshold: the app earns its price when you sign often enough that the fiddling adds up — a landlord with monthly leases, a contractor with invoices, a parent drowning in school forms. Below that, Markup wins on price and it isn’t close.

The short version

Signing a PDF on an iPhone never requires a subscription. Markup is free, built in, and permanent.
Browser tools are free per document but upload your file and cap the free tier — you’re trading privacy and a later paywall for convenience now.
Check In-App Purchases on any App Store listing before you install, and cancel subscriptions in Settings, not in the app.
Paid apps (ours included) are for volume, not necessity. If Markup covers you, keep your money.