Spaywall lets you LEGALLY avoid paywalls on older articles by redirecting you to an archived version of the page in the Internet Archives project (archive.org).
Because we are pointing you to a different website, we are not bypassing or messing at all with the original paywall on the article source. Spaywall is 100% FREE, and we do not collect any data whatsoever.
** NOTE **
– Because we retrieve an archived copy, an archived copy must exist. This means articles typically need to be older than a few weeks. It will often not work on current news stories!
– Our algorithm is usually able to detect an archived paywall and avoid that too, but please not this doesn’t work 100% of the time
And please… if you frequent a certain news outlet, please consider supporting quality journalism!
100% completely useless, for me. It works in a very passive way – they amass news articles and serve you the cached copies. Unfortunately this means you can only read articles which have been out for at least a few weeks! Who only reads the news from a few weeks ago? Also, why would anyone design an extension that works this way? It’s a bad idea and completely useless to 99% what most people are looking for.
(Hot tip: right-click on the page’s background, change ‘display: flex’ to ‘display: none’, then delete ‘overflow:hidden’ from the tag. That will show the article, works on almost all paywalls.)
It actually works. Yay!
Worked great on the Nat. Geo. article i needed for class
This is nice for anyone who does research or like to ready a lot of news. It was helpful to me to get past a few paywalls. Worth the extension, I hope Nerdy Labs keeps making great products like this.
Love love love being able to read articles without being stopped by paywalls. I’ve recently completed some local real estate research and was able to pull up relevant articles across several newspaper sites….for free. The only downside is the articles have to be old enough to be archived, but for me that’s worth avoiding paying for several subscriptions. Thanks for putting this together!