alt Hacker NewsWallHop – 12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement
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Long back I was wondering if a tip jar type service that'll get me access to what I actually want to see would be a better solution in place of subscribing to every website that produces an interesting article once in a while. There were a couple of such services but they never got popular.
Perhaps this model alone is not sustainable but it could be paired with ads (as in ads or fee off a tip jar pay). Even then, it surely won't lead to infinite growth, which is the only goal nowadays.
It is not working on
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/two-seats-...
Well dang, I thought it would just be a worse archive.today (yes the owner doesn't like that it's used for piracy so much), but wallhop works on wsj, ft, and nytimes. It's quite convenient because it doesn't have the recaptcha from archive.today, I'm curious to see how long it lasts.
It really should be quite easy to make one of these. I mean there's only so much new articles every day. If you just had one account it should be able to get the content on sites with hard paywalls.
Wallhop doesn't have a hard, hard paywall bypass? Maybe it's just not been attempted yet, but 404media paid only is not bypassed. For example: https://www.404media.co/heres-the-video-for-our-seventh-foia...
BPWC works for WSJ, Nytimes but not ft. Archive.today works for NYT, FT, and occasionally WSJ.
This is great, straight into my bookmarks. I've been using archive.is but it's much more of a faff.
is this legal? or even ethical?
We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.
E.g Could we just have one consortium of media contents to subscribe and use it across the web for a month, than buying in each website.
I like the domain. It's very easy to remember ... and intuitive.
p.s. I've added it to SaaSHub too https://www.saashub.com/wallhop-alternatives
Why did 12ft.io go (and all the others), do they get legal action eventually?
can you expose an endpoint for “most requested articles” list, would be great
Install it now, thank me later: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads
It's not working on WSJ.
Why did 12ft io go away?
12ft? <looks around> Does anyone use that? Not around here, archive.today standard.
It's fast, nice. But trustworthy? There's so little indication that the content hasn't been tampered with or even when it was scraped.
This is cool. Do you also have a version that provides free versions of paid SaaS apps? If not, why not?
> Paywalls pay for journalism. If there’s a paper or news site you read every day, please subscribe to it. WallHop is for the one-off article someone texts you from a site you’ll never visit again.
What protection is implemented to make sure of this? Or you leave the choice to the good moral of the users?
Looking forward to a Yunohost package to replace the 12ft.io one. https://appgenerator.yunohost.org
Bless you!
Thank you! Thank you very much.
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Hi HN, I'm Josh. WallHop is a free paywall bypass: paste an article URL (or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/) and you get the readable article without the paywall popup, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension.
I built it after 12ft.io went away. The News Media Alliance took it down in July 2025 and I missed having something I could hit from my phone.
How it works: it started as a fork of everywall/ladder (GPL-3.0) and I've modified it heavily since. Instead of relying on one trick, it chains several bypass methods per request and falls back to archive.is when they all fail, so one site blocking one technique doesn't break it.
Things that might be interesting:
- iOS Shortcut: on iPhone, tap Share > WallHop from any article in Safari or another app. This is how I use it 95% of the time. - It works on Medium member-only posts, which 12ft never handled. - Bookmarklet for desktop, plus /raw/<url> and /api/<url> endpoints if you want to script it.
I've tested it against most major news outlets and a bunch of local papers. It won't work everywhere. There are SOME server-side paywalls that are out of reach, and I'd rather say that up front. If you find a site that breaks, I'd love the link, and I can likely figure out a way to bypass it!
Why not open source? You modified GPL-3 ladder; I don’t know whether it’s legally required, but I feel it’s morally expected and important in practice (since yours may get taken down).