Boston.com Paywall: How to Read Boston.com Articles for Free

Boston.com is the free-to-read sister site of The Boston Globe. It began in the mid-1990s as the Globe's own web address, was spun off into a separate, advertising-funded site with its own newsroom, and for three decades it was where Bostonians went for local news, Red Sox coverage, weather, traffic and the city's lighter stories without being asked to pay. That changed in late October 2025, when Boston Globe Media put a metered paywall on it for the first time. If you have recently opened a Boston.com link and met a subscription prompt where there never used to be one, this guide explains what happened and how to read the full article.

How the Boston.com paywall works

Boston.com now runs a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can read a limited number of articles in a month before a prompt asks them to subscribe, and Boston Globe Media has said the free-article limit is adjusted over time rather than fixed. At launch the subscription was reported at 5 dollars a month bundled with Boston magazine, or 90 dollars a year for Boston.com on its own. Globe subscribers do not get Boston.com included, which surprised a lot of people, since the two sites share a parent, a building and a good deal of content.

The meter is run by Piano, the same subscription platform the Globe and many other US publishers use. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a Piano script then counts your visits in a browser cookie and, once you pass the limit, swaps the body for the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and Boston.com sits firmly on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 23 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 734-word Boston.com Scenic Six travel column, with readers celebrating Boston's charms, a slime attraction coming downtown and Maine hotel stays from 99 dollars, loaded in full, all 24 paragraphs.
• An 810-word Boston.com local news story introducing the eight finalists competing to become the next voice of Logan Airport's announcements loaded in full, all 42 paragraphs.
• A 604-word Boston.com Red Sox story on the team losing a key executive to another club for the second year running loaded in full, all 23 paragraphs.

Read a Boston.com article in full

• Copy the article link. Boston.com links look like boston.com/news/local-news/2026/10/21/ followed by the headline as a slug, with sports stories under boston.com/sports/ and travel under boston.com/travel/.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the text the publisher serves. Boston.com articles that are really Globe stories republished on the sister site come through the same way, since the text is in the page either way.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. Boston.com sends several free email newsletters, including a morning briefing and sports and lifestyle bulletins, that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a Piano cookie, so a private browser window starts the count again. Boston Globe Media may tighten this over time, as the Globe itself has.
• Wire and agency copy. A good share of Boston.com's national and sports news is Associated Press copy, which is published free on AP's own site and on hundreds of other outlets.
• The bundle. If you want Boston.com and Boston magazine, the bundled subscription is the cheaper way to get both.

Boston.com, the Globe and Boston magazine

All three titles belong to Boston Globe Media, and all three come through the reader. The Boston Globe has one of the strictest meters in American regional journalism and has had it for years. Boston magazine, the city monthly the company bought in 2024, has its own guide. Boston.com was the last of the three to get a paywall and still has the most generous meter. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Boston.com kept a local newsroom running on advertising alone for longer than almost any other American news site, and the paywall arrived because that model stopped covering the cost. If you read it every day for Red Sox news, traffic and the stories the Globe does not carry, the subscription is modest and keeps that newsroom going.