Paste any paywalled article URL and read it instantly, for free.
No sign-ups, no extensions. Just paste and read.
We don't track you. Your reading habits stay yours.
Works on hundreds of news sites worldwide.
Unpaywall fetches paywalled articles by requesting them as a search engine crawler would. Many news sites serve the full article to crawlers for SEO purposes. We then strip out paywall scripts and overlays so you can read the content cleanly.
It works best on "soft paywalls" — sites that load the full article but hide it behind a JavaScript overlay. This includes most major news sites. "Hard paywalls" (where the content is never delivered without payment) cannot be bypassed.
Unpaywall accesses content that is already publicly served to search engine crawlers. We don't circumvent authentication systems or steal content. Use it responsibly.
Yes! Those sites use soft paywalls. If one method fails (some block Googlebot), we automatically fall back to alternative user agents, Google Cache, or the Wayback Machine.
Some sites have JavaScript that hides the content after loading. We now strip all JavaScript from fetched pages to prevent this. If you still see a blank page, the article likely has a hard paywall.
Yes — sites with hard paywalls (TechCrunch Premium, Financial Times, some local newspapers) don't serve the article text at all without payment. We also can't bypass CAPTCHAs or bot detection services.