12ft.io Alternatives in 2026: What Still Works for Reading Paywalled Articles
12ft.io has been offline for long stretches and no longer works on many sites. Here are the alternatives that still read paywalled articles in 2026, and how each one compares.
Paywall behaviour last tested
For a few years 12ft.io was the best-known paywall tool on the web. You typed 12ft.io/ in front of an article link, and the site fetched the page without JavaScript, which defeated most metered paywalls. Its tagline, "show me a 10ft paywall, I'll show you a 12ft ladder", became a meme. It has been offline for long stretches since 2024, and even when it is up it fails on many of the sites it once handled. This post covers what to use instead.
Why 12ft.io stopped working
12ft.io relied on one trick: fetching a page and stripping out its scripts, so that a browser-side paywall never ran. That still works in principle, and it is the same idea behind most alternatives. Two things went wrong for 12ft.io specifically. Publishers began blocking its servers and the addresses it fetched from, so more and more sites returned errors. And the service itself went down for extended periods, reportedly after complaints from publishers to its hosting provider. Many of the links people still share to 12ft.io now return nothing at all.
Alternatives that work in 2026
Skip the Paywall
Skip the Paywall does what 12ft.io did, with a few differences. It fetches the page from its own servers in the way a search engine crawler would, extracts the article with the same readability library that powers Firefox's reader view, and shows the text in a clean layout. It falls back to an archived copy if the publisher refuses the request. It works on metered and freemium sites, which is most magazines and regional newspapers; our full list is kept up to date. Like 12ft.io and everything else, it cannot open hard paywalls such as the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal.
Archive sites
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and archive.today store copies of pages. If someone has saved the article you want, you can read the saved copy. The weaknesses are that recent articles are often not archived yet, the sites have frequent outages and captchas, and archived copies of hard-paywalled sites usually contain the same teaser everyone else sees. Our post on archive.ph problems covers the details.
Browser reader mode
Safari, Firefox and Edge can reformat a page as plain text. This occasionally captures an article before the paywall script hides it, but it is a race you usually lose, and it does nothing about the meter itself. Fine for decluttering; unreliable for paywalls.
Private windows
A private window resets cookie-based meters. It still works on some sites (LA Times, Globe and Mail, Slate) and is detected and blocked on others (Business Insider, The Boston Globe, most Condé Nast titles). Worth one try, not a strategy.
Browser extensions
Several extensions automate the cookie-clearing and script-stripping tricks. The best-known ones have been removed from the Chrome Web Store more than once, and the survivors need manual installation and regular updates. If you are comfortable with that, they work on roughly the same set of sites as a server-side reader. If not, a website that needs no installation is simpler.
Library access
Not a 12ft.io alternative in the technical sense, but the only method that also opens hard paywalls. Most public libraries provide free digital access to major papers with a library card. See sites that cannot be bypassed for which libraries offer what.
Which to pick
For the article a friend just sent from a magazine or regional paper, a server-side reader is the fastest and most reliable option and the closest replacement for what 12ft.io used to do. For the FT, WSJ, Bloomberg or The Economist, nothing in this category works, and a library login or a subscription is the answer. Our comparison of every method goes into more detail on each.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The New Yorker and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Is 12ft.io down permanently?
It has been offline for extended periods since 2024 and has not returned reliably. Even when it responds, many publishers now block it. Treat it as unavailable and use an alternative.
What is the closest alternative to 12ft.io?
A server-side reader such as Skip the Paywall does the same job: it fetches the page without running its scripts and shows the article text. It works on metered and freemium paywalls and, like 12ft.io, not on hard paywalls.
Did 12ft.io work on The New York Times?
It did for a time, but the Times blocked it long before the service went offline. No current reader tool opens The New York Times; library access is the reliable free route.