Inc42 Paywall: How to Read Inc42 Plus Articles for Free

Inc42 is the Indian startup ecosystem's trade paper: funding rounds, layoffs, regulatory moves, founder profiles and the running scoreboard of who raised what from whom. Its daily news feed is widely read in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai, and increasingly by investors abroad watching Indian tech. The deeper reporting and analysis sits behind Inc42 Plus, the site's subscription tier, and links to those pieces are the ones that stop at a sign-up prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the Inc42 paywall works

Inc42 runs a freemium model. Short news items in the Buzz section are free to read with advertising. Longer reports, data-led analysis, founder interviews and the site's research reports are marked as Inc42 Plus, and a non-subscriber sees the opening paragraphs followed by a prompt to join. Some Plus pieces are also metered, allowing a few free reads before the gate closes.

The gate is applied in the browser. Inc42 publishes the full text in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks for a subscriber login and hides the body if there is none. A crawler-style reader that fetches the page without running the script receives the whole article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why this matters.

Our tests on 10 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,136-word Inc42 round-up of the startups in Peak XV's Surge 12 cohort loaded in full, all 27 paragraphs.
• A 687-word Inc42 report on Anthropic tightening its rules on misuse of AI models loaded in full, all 21 paragraphs.
• A 543-word Inc42 story on Amazon's global job cuts reaching at least 100 staff in India loaded in full, all 17 paragraphs.

Read an Inc42 article in full

• Copy the article link. Inc42 links look like inc42.com/buzz/headline-slug/ for news and inc42.com/features/ for longer pieces.
• 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.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. Inc42's free daily and weekly emails summarise the main stories and link through to them.
• Funding data elsewhere. Round sizes and investor names are usually also reported by the companies themselves, by Mint and by the wire services, so the headline facts are rarely exclusive.
• Private windows. Where a Plus piece is metered rather than locked, a private window resets the count.
• Student and startup plans. Inc42 has offered discounted Plus access to students and early-stage founders at various times; check the subscription page.

How it compares with other Indian business news

Inc42 joins a growing group of Indian titles that load in full: The Ken, which is subscriber-only, Mint with its premium stories, and Times of India including TOI+. The Economic Times is the exception: it returns only a short preview and does not work. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Inc42 is an independent newsroom funded by subscriptions, events and research, and Plus is what pays for its investigations into the startups it covers. If you work in or invest in Indian tech and read it daily, a Plus subscription is the right way to support it.