About Skip the Paywall
A free reader that fetches a news article the way a search engine does and shows you the text in a clean layout. No account, no extension, nothing stored.
What it does
Paste the link to an article and the reader requests that page from the publisher, identifying itself as a search-engine crawler would. It extracts the article with Mozilla's open-source Readability library, the same code behind Firefox's reader view, removes scripts, adverts and embedded frames, and shows you the headline, byline, text and inline images. If the publisher refuses the request, it looks for an archived copy in the Internet Archive.
Because it never runs the page's JavaScript, it never triggers the browser-side meters that most magazines and regional newspapers use. That is why it works on 31 publications we have tested, listed on the home page, and not on sites that enforce their paywalls on the server. Our guide to metered versus hard paywalls explains the difference.
What it will not do
- It does not use subscriber accounts, shared logins or stolen credentials. It can only show text that a publisher's server sends to an anonymous visitor.
- It does not open hard paywalls such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg or The Economist, and we say so plainly in our guide to those sites.
- It does not store articles. Each read is generated on demand and discarded, and reader pages are excluded from search engines so they never compete with the original.
Our view on paying for journalism
Paywalls exist because journalism costs money, and the tool is meant for the occasional article a friend sends, not as a substitute for a subscription. Every guide on this site ends with a suggestion to subscribe to anything you read regularly, and we mean it. Our post on the legal and ethical questions sets out where we draw the line.
How we test
Every publication on the supported list was checked by pasting a current article into the live reader and comparing the result with the original. A site counts as working only if the full article comes back, not a teaser. We re-test periodically, remove sites that stop working, and record the results in the guides.
Our privacy page explains what the site collects.