Bypass Paywalls Clean Not Working or Gone? The Alternatives in 2026

Bypass Paywalls Clean is the best-known paywall extension. It is community maintained, and it works by stripping paywall scripts and cookies site by site, with a rule for each publisher. It is also the hardest paywall tool to keep running. It is not distributed through the Chrome Web Store. It has repeatedly been removed from the major code-hosting and extension sites after complaints from publishers, so it has to be installed by hand in developer mode and updated manually, and each time it moves or breaks, people go looking for alternatives. This post covers what those alternatives are and, honestly, what each of them can and cannot do.

Why it keeps disappearing

The extension's approach depends on being installed as unpacked code in a browser's developer mode, because the official extension stores will not carry it. Its source has been hosted on several platforms in turn, and the removal decisions were made by those hosting platforms after publisher complaints. When the code moves, old installations stop receiving updates, the per-site rules go stale, and a browser update can disable developer-mode extensions altogether. None of this means the idea has stopped working. It means the maintenance burden falls on you, and when you do not want that burden, the options below are the ones left.

A server-side reader

Skip the Paywall does the same job from the other direction. Instead of modifying the page in your browser, it fetches the article from its own server the way a search crawler does, extracts the text and shows it in a clean layout. There is nothing to install and nothing to update. It works on the same metered and freemium sites an extension can handle, which is most magazines and most regional newspapers, including The New Yorker, The Times (UK), Rolling Stone and Medium. The full list of supported sites is kept current. Like every tool in this category, it fails on the hard paywalls: the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Economist never send the article text to non-subscribers, and The New York Times blocks automated requests outright. Our posts on sites that cannot be bypassed and the New York Times paywall explain what to do about those.

A bookmarklet or a phone shortcut

The thing people miss most about an extension is the one-click convenience. A bookmarklet gives that back on a desktop browser: one bookmark that sends the current page to the reader, with no install and nothing for a browser update to disable. On a phone, the iPhone and Android shortcut does the same from the share sheet. Neither can be removed from a store because neither lives in one.

The browser's built-in reader mode

Firefox and Safari both have a reader mode that reformats a page as plain text. On some metered sites it captures the article before the paywall script hides it, because the paywall runs after the page loads and reader mode grabs the text first. It is worth a try when you are already on the page, but it is inconsistent, it does nothing about a meter that is enforced on the server, and on many sites the paywall wins the race.

Archive sites

archive.today and the Wayback Machine store saved copies of pages. If someone has already archived the article you want, the saved copy is usually complete on metered sites. The drawbacks are that recent stories are often not archived yet, archive.today has frequent outages and captchas, and a saved copy of a hard-paywalled site typically holds the same teaser everyone else sees.

12ft.io and its successors

12ft.io was a web-based paywall tool that worked on the same principle as a server-side reader, and for a while it was the easiest option of all. It has been offline for long stretches and is blocked by many publishers. Our post on 12ft.io alternatives covers what replaced it.

Library access

For the hard paywalls that no extension, reader or archive can open, a library card is the free route. Many public libraries provide digital access to major newspapers, and that access is a real subscription rather than a workaround. The sites that cannot be bypassed post lists which libraries offer what.

What each option can and cannot do

Bypass Paywalls Clean

• Can: remove browser-enforced paywalls on a long list of sites, one click, inside the page you are already reading.
• Cannot: be installed from a store, update itself reliably, or open hard paywalls. Needs developer mode and manual maintenance.

A server-side reader

• Can: read the same metered and freemium sites with no install, on any device, from any browser.
• Cannot: open hard paywalls or sites with bot protection, and it shows text and images rather than the original page layout.

A bookmarklet or phone shortcut

• Can: give one-tap convenience on desktop and mobile without an extension.
• Cannot: do anything on its own. It depends on the reader behind it, so it has the same limits.

Reader mode

• Can: occasionally capture a metered article before the paywall hides it.
• Cannot: be relied on. It loses the race on many sites and ignores server-side meters entirely.

Archive sites

• Can: show a saved copy of an article, including on sites that now block live requests.
• Cannot: show stories nobody has saved, and copies of hard-paywalled sites are usually the teaser.

Library access

• Can: open the hard paywalls, legitimately, with full access.
• Cannot: be used in one click, and the papers on offer vary by library.

Which to pick

If you installed Bypass Paywalls Clean for magazines and regional papers, a server-side reader plus a bookmarklet or phone shortcut replaces it with less effort and nothing to maintain. If you installed it hoping to read the FT, WSJ or Bloomberg, nothing in this category does that, and library access or a subscription is the answer. The background on why those sites differ is in metered versus hard paywalls, and our comparison of every method goes through each option in more detail.

Our recommendation

An extension that has to be installed by hand and re-found every few months is a lot of upkeep for a result a website can give you for free. For the sites that extensions can handle, use a server-side reader and a shortcut. For the sites they cannot, use a library or pay for the paper you actually read.