How to Sign a PDF Online for Free — Without Uploading Your Document

You need to sign a PDF. Maybe it's a lease, a freelance contract, a permission slip, or an NDA that landed in your inbox ten minutes ago. You search "sign PDF online free" and find a dozen tools. They all want you to upload your document to their servers, create an account, or install software. For a contract that might contain your salary, your address, or your Social Security number, that's a lot of trust to hand over to a random website.

We built something different. FixMyPDF's Sign PDF tool runs entirely in your browser. Your document never leaves your device — not to our servers, not to a cloud provider, not anywhere. You upload the file to the tool, type your name, click where you want the signature, and download the signed PDF. The whole process takes about 15 seconds.

How It Works: Three Steps

Features That Match Paid Tools

Most free PDF signing tools are stripped-down teasers designed to push you toward a subscription. FixMyPDF's Sign PDF tool doesn't hold anything back.

Four signature fonts. Not just one generic cursive option — you get a flowing signature, an elegant formal script, a casual handwritten style, and a clean printed look. Each one renders differently enough to give you a real choice based on the document and the impression you want to make.

Precise placement and resizing. Click anywhere on the document to place your signature. Drag it to reposition with pixel accuracy. Use the resize handle in the corner to scale it up or down until it fits the signature line exactly. No guessing, no misalignment.

Optional timestamp. Toggle "Add date" in the toolbar to automatically stamp the current date and time beneath your signature in your local timezone. Useful for contracts and agreements where the signing date matters. The timestamp renders in a clean, small font aligned to the bottom-right of your signature.

Multi-page, multi-signature support. Navigate between pages and place as many signatures as you need. Initial page 3, sign page 7, date page 12 — all in one session. Every placed signature is independent, so you can size and position each one separately.

Zero quality loss. This is important. Many online signing tools flatten your PDF to images, which destroys text selectability, reduces resolution, and bloats file size. FixMyPDF uses pdf-lib to embed your signature text directly into the original PDF structure. Every page, font, image, form field, and bookmark is preserved exactly as it was. The only change is your added signature.

How We Compare to Other Signing Tools

The competitors are solid tools. DocuSign and Adobe Sign are industry standards with features like audit trails, multi-party signing workflows, and legal compliance certifications that FixMyPDF doesn't offer. If you're managing a signing workflow for a team or need certified digital signatures, those tools are worth paying for.

But if you just need to put your name on a document and send it back — which is what most people need most of the time — you don't need an account, a subscription, or a file upload. You need to type your name, click, and download.

Why the "No Upload" Part Matters

When you sign a document with DocuSign or Smallpdf, your file travels to their servers, gets processed, and comes back. The companies say they delete it after processing (Smallpdf says one hour, DocuSign varies by plan). And they probably do.

But "probably" isn't good enough for a signed contract with your legal name and personal details on it. Between upload and deletion, your document passes through load balancers, CDN edge nodes, processing servers, temporary storage, and logging systems. Each hop is a surface that could be cached, backed up, or intercepted.

With FixMyPDF, the file never enters a network connection after the page loads. You can verify this yourself: open the tool, disconnect your internet, and use it. It works exactly the same. There's no server to breach because there's no server involved.

Are Electronic Signatures Legally Binding?

Yes. In the United States, the ESIGN Act (2000) and UETA (adopted by 49 states) give electronic signatures the same legal standing as handwritten ones for most purposes. In the European Union, eIDAS provides a similar framework. A typed name placed on a document with intent to sign qualifies as an electronic signature under both frameworks.

There are exceptions — certain documents like wills, court orders, and specific real estate transfers may require wet signatures or notarization depending on your jurisdiction. For everyday contracts, agreements, NDAs, permission forms, and business documents, a typed electronic signature is fully valid.

When You Might Need Something Else

FixMyPDF's Sign PDF tool is designed for individual signing — you sign a document and download or email it yourself. It doesn't currently support sending a document to another person for a counter-signature through the tool, because that would require storing your document on a server, which contradicts the entire privacy model.

If you need multi-party signing workflows with audit trails, automated reminders, or legally certified digital signatures (as opposed to standard electronic signatures), DocuSign and Adobe Sign are purpose-built for that. They're worth the cost if your use case demands those features.

For everything else — and that's probably 90% of the PDFs you'll ever need to sign — the process is: open, type, click, download.

The Sign PDF tool is available now alongside all 17 other tools in the FixMyPDF toolkit. Free users get 2 uses per tool per day — enough to sign a contract and send it back without paying a cent. If you're signing documents regularly, Pro removes all limits for $9/month.