How to Read Time and Fortune Articles Without a Subscription

Time and Fortune are two of the oldest names in American magazine publishing, and both have spent the last few years turning their websites into subscription businesses. Neither is as strict as The Boston Globe, but if you read either one regularly you will run into the "You've reached your limit" screen before long.

How the Time paywall works

Time.com uses a metered paywall. Visitors get a small number of free articles per month, tracked by a cookie, and then see a subscription prompt in place of the article body. Time also marks some pieces, particularly cover stories and long features, as subscriber-only from the first view.

Whether metered or subscriber-only, the article text is still delivered in the page so that search engines can index it. In our latest test, a 1,700-word Time news analysis loaded in full through the reader, including all 43 paragraphs and the contributing reporter credit at the bottom.

How the Fortune paywall works

Fortune runs a similar system, with a monthly meter and a "Fortune Premium" tier for its longer investigations and rankings coverage. The site also gates parts of its lists, such as the Fortune 500 data, behind a login. Ordinary articles, including commentary pieces, are metered rather than hard-walled. A 1,000-word Fortune commentary came through complete in our test.

Read a Time or Fortune article in full

• Copy the article link. Time links look like time.com/article/2026/09/26/headline-slug/ and Fortune links like fortune.com/2026/09/26/headline-slug/.
• Paste it into Skip the Paywall and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader fetches the page the way a search crawler does, extracts the article with a readability parser and never runs the paywall script, so the meter is never triggered.

What does not work

• Fortune 500 and other data lists. These are interactive tables loaded by JavaScript after the page renders, so a text reader gets only the introduction.
• Time's video and interactive features. Same reason. If a piece is mostly embedded media, open the original.
• The print editions. Time and Fortune both sell digital replicas of the magazine. Those require a login and are not accessible through a reader.

Business magazines with hard paywalls

It is worth knowing which business titles cannot be read this way, so you do not waste time trying. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Barron's all use server-side paywalls: the article body is never sent to a non-subscriber, and a search crawler gets a truncated version too. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers the difference in detail. For business news that does work, see our guide to Business Insider.

Consider subscribing

Both magazines run frequent offers, often under two dollars a month for the first year. If you read either one every week, that is a fair price for the reporting.