Krautreporter Paywall: How to Read Krautreporter Articles for Free

Krautreporter is the Berlin online magazine that was crowdfunded into existence in 2014, when some fifteen thousand people paid up front for a year of journalism that did not yet exist and the campaign reached its €900,000 goal in June 2014. It carries no advertising, is organised as a members' cooperative (Genossenschaft) and sets out to explain the news rather than chase it, with long explanatory features, reported essays and a close relationship with the readers who fund it. Reporting in 2025 put the number of paying members at well over ten thousand. Because almost everything it publishes is written for those members, a reader arriving from a search result or a shared link usually meets an invitation to join before the text appears. This guide explains how the Krautreporter membership wall works and how to read a full article.

How the Krautreporter paywall works

Krautreporter does not sell a subscription in the usual sense. Articles are for members (Mitglieder), and membership is priced monthly or yearly through Steady, the Berlin membership platform used by many independent German publishers. There is no advertising to pay for free access, so there is no free tier of the kind that national dailies offer, and no monthly allowance of open articles as far as we can tell. The occasional piece is opened to everyone, but the default is members only.

The gate itself runs in the browser. Article pages carry a schema.org flag, isAccessibleForFree set to "False", alongside the Steady membership script. As far as we can tell the full text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and the script then checks for a membership and swaps the body for the join prompt if it finds none. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and Krautreporter, despite having no free tier, sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 30 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,119-word Krautreporter feature on a mother for whom being gay is a sin, until her son comes out ("Für Christine ist Schwulsein eine Sünde, dann outet sich ihr Sohn") loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs.
• A 5,285-word Krautreporter essay "Wo auch immer Juden sind, es ist nie richtig" loaded in full, all 92 paragraphs.
• A 3,743-word Krautreporter piece on why many products are better abroad than in Germany ("Warum viele Produkte anderswo besser sind als in Deutschland") loaded in full, all 34 paragraphs.

Three of three, and these are long pieces. The 5,285-word essay came back complete down to its last sentence.

Read a Krautreporter article in full

• Copy the article link. Krautreporter links look like krautreporter.de followed by a numeric id and the headline as a slug.
• 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.

The reader shows the article in German, exactly as Krautreporter published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way, and Krautreporter's plain explanatory style translates well. When a publisher withholds the body on its server the reader can only show the preview, and it says so, but none of the Krautreporter articles we tested behaved that way.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. Krautreporter sends free email newsletters that introduce its new pieces and link to them, which is the easiest way to see what it is publishing without a membership.
• Private windows. There is no monthly meter to reset, as far as we can tell, so a private window makes no difference. The wall is about membership, not about how many articles you have opened.
• Public broadcasters. ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandfunk publish their reporting free of charge, and Krautreporter's explanatory pieces often draw on the same public sources.
• Related free sources. Krautreporter links to its sources generously, so the studies, statistics and official documents behind a piece are usually a click away and free to read.

How it compares with other German-language titles

Krautreporter is the first German members-only magazine on our list. The Berlin weekly der Freitag, another independent title, loads in full and has its own guide, and so does NZZ in Zurich. The big German nationals are a different story: Spiegel+ and Handelsblatt return only teasers in our tests, and Süddeutsche Zeitung blocks the reader outright, so none of them is listed. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Krautreporter has no advertising and no owner behind it other than its members, so the membership fee is the only thing paying for the journalism. If you find yourself reading its features every week, a monthly or yearly membership is the right way to keep that reporting going, and it gives you a say in the cooperative as well.