- Note: The 12ft ladder service is no longer working.
- RemovePaywalls: Positioned as a 12ft.io alternative and actively maintained as of late 2025; same basic idea of fetching cached version
- Archive.is: Note: seems to be down as of March 1, Acts as a full-page snapshot service. You add the URL like this “https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/us/politics/cia-israel-ayatollah-compound.html”. It works best on traditional news sites and is useful for long‑term preservation, not just bypassing.
12ft Ladder is a service to bypass paywalls. You can enter any paywalled URL into 12ft Ladder and see the full article in an uncluttered “reader” mode.
12ft Ladder pulls up a cached Google version of the article. News sites don’t show a paywall to the Google crawler. So the service shows you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
You can also prepend “12ft.io/” to the URL of any paywalled page to see the article. The format to use is:
For example, this is a URL to read an article from The Times newspaper — “https://12ft.io/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/red-bull-boycott-sky-after-reporter-ted-kravitz-says-lewis-hamilton-was-robbed-0027nkl70”.
