How to Read The i Paper Without Subscribing
The i Paper meters its website and asks for a subscription after a few articles. Here is how the i paywall works and how to read its news and analysis in full for free.
Paywall behaviour last tested
The i started life in 2010 as a cut-price sibling of The Independent and outlived its parent's print edition. Now owned by the Daily Mail's publisher and rebranded as The i Paper, it has a reputation for concise, balanced news and sharp political analysis. Its website, inews.co.uk, runs a metered paywall, and regular readers hit it quickly. Here is how to read the full article.
How the i paywall works
The i Paper uses a metered paywall. Readers without a subscription get a small number of free articles a month, tracked in a browser cookie, after which the article body is replaced with a subscription offer. There is no separate premium tier; every article counts against the same meter.
The important detail is where the text lives. The i sends the whole article in the page so that search engines can index it, and relies on a script in the browser to hide it once the meter is exhausted. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does and never runs that script gets the complete text. In our latest test, an 840-word i analysis piece loaded in full through Skip the Paywall.
Read an i Paper article in full
- Copy the article link from inews.co.uk.
- Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
- The article appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full body.
Why the i is worth reading
The i's selling point is brevity: it summarises the day's news in a way that respects your time, and its Westminster and health coverage often breaks stories the bigger papers follow. Its lack of an owner-driven editorial line also makes it a useful counterweight to the more partisan British titles.
Other tricks
- Private windows reset the cookie-based meter and still work on inews.co.uk in most cases.
- Google search referrals sometimes get a free read, though this is less reliable than it used to be.
- The print edition remains one of the cheapest national papers in Britain if you would rather read on paper.
Related UK titles
We have tested the other British nationals with the same method. The Independent and The Times both load in full. The Telegraph blocks automated access, and the Financial Times never sends its article text to non-subscribers. For the reasons behind those differences, see metered versus hard paywalls.
Support the i if you read it daily
The i's digital subscription is inexpensive and includes the app and the digital edition. If it is your daily read, that is a fair price for a newsroom that publishes fewer, better stories than most.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The i Paper and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Is The i Paper the same as The Independent?
Not any more. The i was launched by The Independent in 2010 but was sold in 2016 and is now owned by the publisher of the Daily Mail. The two papers have separate websites and separate paywalls.
How many free articles does inews.co.uk allow?
The i does not publish a fixed number and adjusts the meter over time. Most readers see the subscription prompt after a handful of articles in a month.
Does the reader work on i Paper puzzles and the digital edition?
No. Puzzles and the page-by-page digital edition are interactive, subscriber-only products. Ordinary articles on inews.co.uk work normally.