Unveiling the Best Tools to Circumvent Paywalls (while still championing journalism)

In an era dominated by digital subscriptions, paywalls have become a commonplace hurdle for those seeking unrestricted access to online content. While it's crucial to support journalism, we get that with the fragmented media market, no one can possibly subscribe to everything. Here's your comprehensive guide to bypassing paywalls responsibly.

Note: While Spaywall aims to provide legal access to news and research, we encourage you to support the journalism you love by directly subscribing to your most-read news outlets.

Search Engine Redirects

Google Search allows users to paste article headlines into the search bar, often leading to free access through special arrangements websites have with Google to not show a paywall. This is a good place to start. Unfortunately, doing this is tedious and does not work consistently.

Incognito windows (aka Private Browsing) or Clearing Cookies

Opening articles in incognito windows or clearing your cookies may offer temporary relief from metered paywalls (i.e. those that allow you to read a certain number of articles per month, which is tracked via browser cookies). Private browsing windows start with a new "blank slate" for their cookies, thus sometimes tricking news outlets into giving you more articles. Unfortunately, we've noticed that this works less and less in recent years. It's likely that news outlets are more-often using your IP address, or some other means of identifying your browser, as they've caught onto this cookie trick.

Using a VPN

Speaking of IP addresses, using a VPN is another option to try to bypass paywalls. VPNs change your IP address, potentially offering more free articles on sites with monthly limits. Unfortunately, VPNs are often used for nefarious purposes, and their IP addresses often end up on a block list. When VPNs reuse these addresses and assign one to you, you become just as likely to be blocked as you are to get around the paywall.

HTML/CSS Editing or Browser Tools

Sometimes news sites send the entire article content to your browser, but then hide it behind a display banner. On these sites, it is often possible to edit HTML or CSS elements using browser tools to potentially reveal hidden content. This does require some technical know-how, and it does not work on all websites. In fact, fewer and fewer websites are using this kind of paywall nowadays, as it's too easy to circumvent.

Archive Services: Often Effective, with Caveats

Web content archive services, such as archive.org or Archive.today can be used to archive web pages, offering a snapshot of content. This includes text and images, and can sometimes by effective at bypassing paywalls.

This method is interesting, as this method is what Spaywall is built upon. Across several archive services, coverage is actually quite good. Many of these services crawl often enough that often same-day news can be archived. But the major downside of archive services is that the paywall itself is often archived right along with the content. If the paywall was shown to the archival crawler service, you'll just see an archived paywall which defeats the purpose.

Spaywall Solves This Problem in Two Ways

First, we offer many archive services on our Premium plan for greater coverage, which means that if one archive source doesn't work, it's easy to try another. Our own internal testing reveals that about 50 to 60% of articles may often be found on our free plan's archive source. And for those users who choose to upgrade to our affordable Premium plan, we typically see 80 to 90% success rates. These results are averages over many news outlets and your mileage may vary for any one particular news outlet.

Secondly, if you manually visit an archive service, you will have to click through all the snapshots that have been made of a particular article (which we've seen in the high hundreds), hoping to find one that didn't include the paywall. This is slow, and a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

Or, let Spaywall do this for you. Our proprietary algorithm searches through all the archive snapshots and redirects you to the one that is most likely to be paywall-free, based on an internal ranking score.

Incredible Performance and Value

While our algorithm strives to find an archived article that is paywall-free, it can never be 100%. For one reason, some sites use a hard paywall, which means even casual visitors don't get any free articles — you must pay and log in to see even one article. Because these are never seen without the paywall, they can never be archived successfully, and none of the other methods listed here will work on these either.

We might be slightly biased, but we believe Spaywall's non-perfect performance is still an incredible value versus paying for every subscription. For less than a cup of coffee, you can enjoy many news articles across hundreds of global news outlets, potentially saving hundreds of dollars per month compared to subscribing to them all.

Not ready to upgrade yet? Try our Free Forever plan as an easy way to get started. There's no account needed, and you can even search directly from our web search without using one of our browser extensions (though they do make news reading even easier).

Did We Mention It's 100% Legal?

Due to how Spaywall works, we effectively allow you to bypass paywalls in a way that does not interfere with the original page whatsoever. In fact we prefer not to say we "remove paywalls", because our servers never even talk to the original news site.

Our algorithm searches for a paywall-free archived version in various internet archives and redirects your browser if one is found. We don't own or have any association with these archives, but simply display their content on this site without making you leave the page.

Thus Spaywall is essentially just linking out to pages already on the internet — one of the most fundamental (and legal, mind you) activities on the web.

Now Supporting Research Articles

Additionally, we've recently branched out to support academic researchers by allowing users to search for scientific and academic research papers and articles. For research papers, we search a database containing millions of scientific and academic papers and articles that have been legally uploaded with full permission of the authors and original publishers.

On average, about half of the scientific literature is available (often called Open Access). Though these papers are freely available, it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, and it's easy to waste a lot of time.

Join the Spaywall Revolution

• 1,300,000+ Articles Searched
• 45,000+ Active Users
• 5 Years and Counting
• The #1 legal paywall browser extension across browser web stores

Support Quality Journalism + Spaywall: A Win-Win Solution

While other methods of removing paywalls may have their place, Spaywall stands out as the go-to solution for affordable and convenient access to news articles. By supporting your favorite journalism directly and choosing Spaywall for the rest, you strike a balance between responsible content consumption and staying informed in a fractured news landscape. Try Spaywall today and unlock a world of news without breaking the law, or breaking the bank.

Ready to read the news without barriers? Get started for free today!

Note: While Spaywall aims to provide legal access to news and research, it's essential to support the journalism you love by directly subscribing to your favorite news outlets. 💗