How to Read Medium Member-Only Stories for Free
Medium limits non-members to a few member-only stories a month. Learn how the meter works, why the full text is still reachable, and how to read any story without a membership.
Paywall behaviour last tested
Medium is where a huge amount of technical writing, personal essays and industry commentary ends up, and most of the good stuff is marked with a small star: member-only. Non-members get a limited number of those stories each month before the site asks for five dollars. If you have hit that limit halfway through a tutorial you actually need, this guide is for you.
How Medium's paywall works
Medium's metering is a hybrid. The author chooses whether a story is member-only, and Medium enforces a monthly allowance for readers who are not logged in as members. The count is tied to your browser cookies and, if you are signed in, to your account.
The crucial point is the same one that applies to The New Yorker and most magazine sites: the article text is delivered to the browser in full, and a script decides whether to show it. Medium needs Google to index every story so that authors get search traffic, so the full text is present in the page for crawlers. The paywall overlay is applied afterwards.
Medium has also long supported a "friend link" that authors can share to give unlimited free access to a member-only story. If you can find the friend link, you do not need anything else. Most of the time you cannot, which is where a reader tool comes in.
Read any Medium story with Skip the Paywall
- Copy the story URL. It can be a medium.com link, a custom-domain publication such as a company engineering blog, or a personal subdomain like username.medium.com.
- Paste it into Skip the Paywall and press Read Article.
- Read the full story in a clean layout, including code blocks, headings and inline images.
In our most recent test, a 3,600-word member-only piece from a large programming publication loaded in full with all 117 paragraphs intact. Custom-domain publications behave the same way, because they are served by Medium's platform under the hood.
Other approaches that still work
- Friend links: if the author has shared one on social media, it grants unlimited access. Search for the story title alongside "friend link".
- Incognito windows: Medium's meter lives in a cookie for logged-out readers, so a private window resets it. Medium has become better at detecting this, so it is hit and miss.
- RSS: some publications expose the full text of stories in their feeds. This is unreliable and depends on the publication's settings.
None of these are as consistent as fetching the page through a reader, which never triggers the meter at all.
Reading code-heavy stories
Medium's editor is popular with developers, and technical stories often contain code blocks and embedded GitHub gists. The reader preserves ordinary code blocks as preformatted text. Embedded gists are iframes, which the reader strips for safety, so if a story relies heavily on embeds you may want to open the original for those parts.
Support the writers you read
Medium's Partner Program pays writers based on member reading time. If you regularly rely on a particular author's tutorials, a membership or a clap on their story genuinely helps them. Think of a reader tool as a way to get past the meter for the one-off story, not as a reason never to pay.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from Medium and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
How many member-only stories can I read for free on Medium?
Medium has changed the number over the years and no longer publishes a fixed figure. Logged-out readers get a small monthly allowance tracked by cookie; after that, member-only stories show a membership prompt.
Does this work for Medium publications on custom domains?
Yes. Publications hosted on their own domain are still served by Medium, so their member-only stories work in exactly the same way when pasted into the reader.
Will the author still get paid if I read through a reader?
No. Partner Program earnings come from members reading on Medium itself. If you value an author, reading on Medium as a member or clapping on the story is what supports them.