Metered vs Hard Paywalls: Why Some Can Be Skipped and Others Can't
Not all paywalls are built the same. Learn the difference between metered, freemium and hard paywalls, and why The New Yorker can be read for free while the Financial Times cannot.
Paywall behaviour last tested
People often ask why a paywall tool works on one site and fails on another. The answer is not luck. Publishers make different technical choices about how to restrict their articles, and those choices determine whether the full text ever leaves their servers. This explainer covers the three main paywall types and what each one means for readers.
The three kinds of paywall
Metered paywalls
A metered paywall lets everyone read a set number of articles per month, then asks for a subscription. The New York Times popularised the model in 2011, and it is now used by The New Yorker, Time and Fortune, The Boston Globe, Wired and hundreds of others.
Almost every metered paywall is enforced in the browser. The server sends the complete article in the HTML, and a script counts your visits in a cookie and hides the text once you pass the limit. The publisher has to send the full text, because Google's crawler needs to read it to rank the page, and Google penalises sites that show the crawler something different from what real visitors see unless the content is clearly marked as paywalled.
Freemium paywalls
A freemium site keeps most articles free and locks a subset, usually the long features, investigations or premium columns. Business Insider, The Verge, The Independent and Bild work this way. Technically, the locked articles are usually handled exactly like a metered site: full text in the page, hidden by a script. So freemium sites tend to behave like metered ones from a reader's point of view.
Hard paywalls
A hard paywall never sends the article body to a non-subscriber. The server checks for a valid login before it renders the story, and everyone else, including crawlers, receives a headline and a short teaser. The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Economist and Barron's all work this way. There is no full text to extract, so no reader tool can retrieve it. This is the one category where "bypass" tools genuinely do not work.
Why the difference matters
Skip the Paywall fetches an article the way a search engine's crawler does, then extracts the text with a readability parser. It never executes the page's JavaScript, so a browser-side meter never runs. That is why it succeeds on metered and freemium sites and fails on hard paywalls: the tool can only show you text the server actually sent.
There is a fourth complication. Some publishers with metered paywalls have added bot protection in front of their sites. Cloudflare or Akamai challenge pages, device-verification screens and IP reputation checks all stop automated fetching regardless of paywall type. The Telegraph, the San Francisco Chronicle and Le Monde fall into this group. Their paywalls might be metered, but the reader never gets far enough to find out.
A quick reference
Based on our latest round of testing:
- Works (metered or freemium, no bot wall): The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, Wired, The Verge, Time, Fortune, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, LA Times, Seattle Times, Star Tribune, The Times (UK), The Independent, The i Paper, Irish Times, The Globe and Mail, National Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Scientific American, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, Slate, The New Republic, The Nation, New York Magazine, Medium.
- Does not work (hard paywall): Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Economist, Barron's, The Washington Post.
- Does not work (bot protection): The Telegraph, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde.
Publishers change their setups without notice, so treat this as a snapshot rather than a guarantee.
What the Times (UK) teaches us
The Times is an interesting edge case. Its paywall looks hard: non-subscribers see nothing but a teaser. Yet the full text is served to search crawlers so that stories can be indexed, which means a crawler-style reader gets it too. Our guide to The Times walks through it. It is a reminder that what matters is not how strict a paywall looks in your browser, but what the server sends when asked the right way.
The trade-off publishers make
Every publisher would prefer a hard paywall from a revenue perspective. The reason most choose metering is reach: they want readers to discover their journalism through search and social media, and they want new readers to sample it before paying. That openness is exactly what makes the articles readable through a tool like this one. If you find yourself relying on a particular title week after week, the fair thing to do is take them up on the subscription offer.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The New Yorker and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
What is a metered paywall?
A metered paywall allows a set number of free articles per month, tracked by a cookie in your browser, before asking you to subscribe. The full article text is usually sent to the browser and hidden by a script once the limit is reached.
What is a hard paywall?
A hard paywall never sends the article body to anyone who is not logged in as a subscriber. Search engines and reader tools receive only a headline and a short teaser, so the full article cannot be retrieved.
Why does Skip the Paywall not work on the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal?
Both sites enforce their paywalls on the server and never send the article text to non-subscribers. There is nothing for the reader to extract beyond the teaser.
Why does a site that used to work suddenly fail?
Publishers regularly change their paywall setup or add bot protection. If a site that previously worked now returns an error, it has usually added a challenge page or moved the paywall to the server.