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).
I plan on it! In my repo, I have some stuff I wouldn't want public in it right now. I am going to clean up the repo and make the fork of the repo public!
It is required when a gift comes with obligations (as with GPL-3; it's not a "Gift Public License").
It is morally expected because we would all ideally like to live in a world where everyone understands the spirit of gifting, which will lead to a better, more just world overall.
If something is granted under GPL terms, it's not a gift. It has terms.
You can accept the terms or decline the thing. The terms are simply not money. The terms are "you can have this and do anything you want with it and the only cost is that you have to give the next guy the same thing you were given."
It's morally expected, not required. And because that's the spirit of FOSS. It's just considered bad form to extract, profit, and not give back.
I don't know any FOSS folks that think they're "giving people a gift" alone. It usually goes deeper than that. Maybe some kind of anti authoritarian, anti establishment, or anti capitalist ideology, or a strong care for user freedom, or a desire to participate in the FOSS community.
I imagine the commenter is worried that if it's open source, publishers can read exactly how it works and then adjust their setups to defeat it. Vs I suspect publishers already know how it works, or could figure it out from their own server instrumentation, or by inspecting client code (I haven't looked at this project but I know a few I've seen previously work mostly with JS and CSS modifications).
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.
Agreed that makes it quite nice! Though I wonder how long that will last, since I imagine archive.today is dealing with some problems that necessitated it.
Yeah, an extension is sometimes easier. My site's audience is for people who mainly browse on mobile or just don't feel like installing extensions. But wallhop.io uses a lot of the same methods that extension does.
Most of the real good software is driven, mostly by p*ssing someone off, then go home on a friday, and by monday... its a wrap. This is how UNIX was written.
Eh... if/when I get a shutdown notice/C&D, I will shut it down immedietly. They usually only sue if you ignore a C&D. I had a movie piracy site that functioned for the most for over a year, but once I got a C&D in my mailbox, I shut it down.
True, several sides,
1. It's not bait and switch, you have a preview of the text and if you like continue, its upto platforms which publishes the link to mark it as paid or free - or by crowdsourcing.
2. Just because a model isn't perfect that doesn't justify a illegal or unethical action. If you don't like it, don't consume.
I agree with you on advertisements, I don't like an ad ridden internet either, but I have come around to thinking, the alternative and the incentive to ad free internet is an easier payment access
My concern is less the page itself showing blurb-with-divider, but what happened a second before when someone clicked the link.
Is there a standard way that these sites are up-front about "Most people won't be able to see what I am choosing to reveal to you" which is communicated to search-engines, and the search-engines are at fault for the bait-and-switch?
>We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.
journalists have always been employed and funded by the rich and powerful so that they can 1) amplify good news about the rich owner 2) drown out bad news about the rich owner 3) push agendas 4) resist opposing agendas.
the concept that at one time journalists were some independent rag tag group of truth-seekers is blown away by any historical recollection of the practice.
so : no , I don't think that we need to find better ways for people to pay and consume ; I think that's entirely up to the profiteers behind the mechanism to figure out how to do.
It's never been easier in history to be a nobody and get a message out to the masses; this is one of the only times in history where a journalist can do their job without selling their souls to the devil (paraphrasing hunter thompson).
and this is ignoring recent internet history of ad-malware, person-tracking, and compulsory clickbait headlines that beg the stupidest low-IQ takes possible in order to get you to click into a paywall.
I feel very little sympathy towards industries that'll save themselves from drowning by stepping onto their customers' heads to avoid the ocean.
Yeah, on my dev.to article about it... I did say that if there's a publication that you read on a regular basis, you should pay and subscribe. This tool is mostly for reading an article that a friend sent you to and to use one-off.
Agree with the above commentor, I don't think you are not legally safe by putting that disclaimer. I know you may have done in good faith, but online news and article sites are in a long battle to get the monetization models right for their users, kinda feel bad for them, even if its one off reading.
You can already pay the journalist's employer, but ultimately your dollars will likely be going to a hedge fund owner or a billionaire like Bezos that buys up media and pays the journalist a bare minimum to keep them generating clicks.
For everyone else that doesn't pay, they'll ask their AI owned by billionaires to summarize the reporting and be satisfied.
What you're suggesting is supporting independent journalism not owned by a hedge fund or billionaire, which will eventually be acquired by capitalist interests unless you somehow magically convince all your neighbors that it's worth monetarily supporting for a greater good.
The people willing to pay $20/mo for AI are not as likely to pay $20/mo to support independent information sources at the same time, especially if you have to first pay to understand what they provide. This is why publications make their reporting freely available to crawlers, like WallHop.
If you regularly use WallHop to access reporting important to you, it's expected you make the investment if you know it will benefit the reporter and not a hedge fund owner/billionaire instead.
Inadvertently, as more high-quality reporting becomes gated behind a paywall, the major AI providers have a financial incentive to pay high-quality information providers with compensation for their original work, which could benefit independent journalists if such a thing were to happen. News exclusives provided to Google, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, or OpenAI would be interesting to see. Would competing AI agents cite their competitors as a news source? Some AI giants are starting their own bio labs, so why not newsrooms?
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!
> ... it chains several bypass methods per request
I'm curious what are the techniques? I'm familiar with spoofing yourself as a Googlebot, or extracting the content directly when paywall enforcement is done in client-side JS only. But surely you need more tricks than that to get around WSJ or NYTimes. Also, ironically, I assume archive.is's CAPTCHA would need bypassing to fall back to that. (but volume might be low enough you can do it with a few cookies you've established trust on)
If newspapers make money literally by writing this content and asking people to pay for it, how is this website not just stealing their content wholesale?
Operating a malware portal is not a good way to advertise, or run a media business, and we’ve no obligation to support that.
If your physical copy of the Sunday Paper got up and walked around your house, rifled through your personal effects, then made a bunch of secret phone calls to shady numbers, would you say “Well, they gotta run a media business, it’s wrong of me not to let them make money this way, after all I agreed when I subscribed”
Don't be glib, it's a legitimate question. If this entire business only exists because they sell content written by their journalists, how is this website not just stealing access?
I own the paper, I paid a journo to research and infiltrate a group of people, he wrote a great article, I want to charge $1 to anyone who cares, now this website comes along and says nah here's the content for free hosted on my site.
How can you prove that AI didn't write it or that it isn't pre-scripted, government-backed propaganda? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't pay a dime for that.
https://wafflehacker.substack.com , and I am on Dev.to , but I don't post as much there. https://dev.to/wafflehacker
Why is reciprocation for a gift required? Gifts are given without obligation conferred.
It is morally expected because we would all ideally like to live in a world where everyone understands the spirit of gifting, which will lead to a better, more just world overall.
You can accept the terms or decline the thing. The terms are simply not money. The terms are "you can have this and do anything you want with it and the only cost is that you have to give the next guy the same thing you were given."
Why is reciprocation such a problem?
I don't know any FOSS folks that think they're "giving people a gift" alone. It usually goes deeper than that. Maybe some kind of anti authoritarian, anti establishment, or anti capitalist ideology, or a strong care for user freedom, or a desire to participate in the FOSS community.
p.s. I've added it to SaaSHub too https://www.saashub.com/wallhop-alternatives
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.
Agreed that makes it quite nice! Though I wonder how long that will last, since I imagine archive.today is dealing with some problems that necessitated it.
This is the way.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/col...
Also, you gon' get sued.
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.
Is it ethical to advertise something that users (or indexers) expect to be freely accessible, and then to pull a bait-and-switch when they arrive?
Is it ethical for ads networks to spy on people, fingerprint their machines, and create dossers about them?
I agree with you on advertisements, I don't like an ad ridden internet either, but I have come around to thinking, the alternative and the incentive to ad free internet is an easier payment access
Is there a standard way that these sites are up-front about "Most people won't be able to see what I am choosing to reveal to you" which is communicated to search-engines, and the search-engines are at fault for the bait-and-switch?
Similar efforts never hit critical mass.
I have thoughts on what could work but that’s a longer topic for another day.
journalists have always been employed and funded by the rich and powerful so that they can 1) amplify good news about the rich owner 2) drown out bad news about the rich owner 3) push agendas 4) resist opposing agendas.
the concept that at one time journalists were some independent rag tag group of truth-seekers is blown away by any historical recollection of the practice.
so : no , I don't think that we need to find better ways for people to pay and consume ; I think that's entirely up to the profiteers behind the mechanism to figure out how to do.
It's never been easier in history to be a nobody and get a message out to the masses; this is one of the only times in history where a journalist can do their job without selling their souls to the devil (paraphrasing hunter thompson).
and this is ignoring recent internet history of ad-malware, person-tracking, and compulsory clickbait headlines that beg the stupidest low-IQ takes possible in order to get you to click into a paywall.
I feel very little sympathy towards industries that'll save themselves from drowning by stepping onto their customers' heads to avoid the ocean.
There are surely ethical newspapers that use paywalls, but the majority in my country (Germany) are mostly about rage bait and/or facist dogwhistles
For everyone else that doesn't pay, they'll ask their AI owned by billionaires to summarize the reporting and be satisfied.
What you're suggesting is supporting independent journalism not owned by a hedge fund or billionaire, which will eventually be acquired by capitalist interests unless you somehow magically convince all your neighbors that it's worth monetarily supporting for a greater good.
The people willing to pay $20/mo for AI are not as likely to pay $20/mo to support independent information sources at the same time, especially if you have to first pay to understand what they provide. This is why publications make their reporting freely available to crawlers, like WallHop.
If you regularly use WallHop to access reporting important to you, it's expected you make the investment if you know it will benefit the reporter and not a hedge fund owner/billionaire instead.
Inadvertently, as more high-quality reporting becomes gated behind a paywall, the major AI providers have a financial incentive to pay high-quality information providers with compensation for their original work, which could benefit independent journalists if such a thing were to happen. News exclusives provided to Google, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, or OpenAI would be interesting to see. Would competing AI agents cite their competitors as a news source? Some AI giants are starting their own bio labs, so why not newsrooms?
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!
I'm curious what are the techniques? I'm familiar with spoofing yourself as a Googlebot, or extracting the content directly when paywall enforcement is done in client-side JS only. But surely you need more tricks than that to get around WSJ or NYTimes. Also, ironically, I assume archive.is's CAPTCHA would need bypassing to fall back to that. (but volume might be low enough you can do it with a few cookies you've established trust on)
If your physical copy of the Sunday Paper got up and walked around your house, rifled through your personal effects, then made a bunch of secret phone calls to shady numbers, would you say “Well, they gotta run a media business, it’s wrong of me not to let them make money this way, after all I agreed when I subscribed”
It’s basic caveat emptor stuff.
https://yahoo.com
;-)
I own the paper, I paid a journo to research and infiltrate a group of people, he wrote a great article, I want to charge $1 to anyone who cares, now this website comes along and says nah here's the content for free hosted on my site.
How does that work?
So the answer to your question is one of these, depending on your personal viewpoint.
1. Obviously it's blatant theft.
2. "Information should be free."