12ft.io is down — here is the best 12ft Ladder alternative
Paste an article link — read it free:
12ft.io (the "12ft Ladder") was taken offline in July 2025 after its host terminated the account under publisher pressure. If your old 12ft.io links stopped working, here is what to use instead.
Is 12ft.io down right now?
Yes — 12ft.io has been offline since July 2025, and it is not a temporary outage. If a 12ft.io link shows an error, a redirect, or a blank page, that is why. Its host disabled the service, so a VPN, a different network, or waiting will not bring it back — switch to an archive-backed reader instead.
What happened to 12ft.io?
12ft.io (the "12ft Ladder") let you skip soft paywalls by requesting pages as a search-engine crawler. In July 2025 its hosting provider disabled it following a takedown effort by news publishers, and the service has not returned. Links of the form 12ft.io/proxy?q=… no longer resolve.
Have an old 12ft.io link? Paste it as is
Links like 12ft.io/proxy?q=… or 12ft.io/https://… still open here: paste the whole thing into the box and RemovePaywall reads the article address out of it and opens that. The same goes for a plain article link — you do not need to change anything.
What to use instead
RemovePaywall is a free, no-login alternative. Instead of only spoofing a crawler, it extracts the clean article, then falls back through archive.today and the Wayback Machine, and finally a smart proxy — so it works on more sites than the old crawler trick, which most large publishers now block.
How it compares
12ft.io relied on a single technique (crawler spoofing) that big publishers have since closed off with reverse-DNS checks and bot protection. RemovePaywall is reader-first and archive-backed, which recovers articles the crawler trick can no longer reach, and shows a clean reading view rather than the raw page.
Free paywall tools compared (2026)
| Tool | How it works | No install | No login | Languages | Shows success rates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RemovePaywall | Reader-first extraction, then archive.today + Wayback, then a sandboxed proxy | Yes (web; optional extension) | Yes | 7 | Yes — live, per site |
| archive.today | Public archive lookup only | Yes | Yes | — | No |
| Bypass Paywall Reader | Aggregator — redirects you to archives (Wayback, archive.today, others) | Yes | Yes | 5 | No |
| Smry.ai | AI reader + article summaries | Yes (also an extension) | Free tier; Pro is paid | — | No |
| Bypass Paywalls Clean | Browser extension with per-site rules | No — sideload from GitHub | Yes | — | No |
Live success rates
Unlike other tools, RemovePaywall shows how often it actually works, from real usage — recent examples: The New Yorker ~100% · WIRED ~100% · The Atlantic ~98% · Business Insider ~97% · The New York Times ~97%. See the full live list.
Got an article in mind? Try it now: