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!
I recommend you familiarize yourself with the GPL-3, if you build something based on a GPL-3 piece of software, it's not an 'optional' obligation. If you want to build something on an open source something and keep your derivative private, then use something that originated as BSD licensed, as Sony did with the FreeBSD kernel that ended up in the PS4 and PS5.
GPL v3.0 has a SaaS loophole. The GPL's trigger is conveyance (transferring a copy), not network access. Merely running modified GPL v3.0 code on a server and serving users over HTTP is not "conveying" under the letter of GPL v3.0, so it does not by itself obligate you to release source. This loophole was fixed in AGPL v3.
Except that the OP has already stated elsewhere in the thread they intend to release it after cleaning it up a bit, so the person I was replying to ('sneak') has much less of a point.
Yes of course there's plenty of companies using GPL licensed software to run their own SaaS. I can think of off the top of my head just about every domain registrar in existence that has their own custom tech stack which almost certainly has tons of bits and pieces of GPL stuff in it, and they're certainly not releasing all their server-side/back-end code.
I would also be very doubtful that people who use bits and pieces of AGPL v3 software in their internal operations are ever going to release their custom modifications of it. In many cases the GPL licensed stuff is implemented in such a way that the user manipulating a publicly-accessible web user interface, a user interface accessible after signing in, or an API will never see or know the exact pieces running under the hood.
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).
Of course they know. I have seen local newspapers who managed to block archive.ph's mechanism. If a bigger outlet does not use technical measures against services like wallhop, it is safe to assume that’s deliberate.
It makes sense economically since the part of the population using such services is so small and may have specific demographics that justify specific treatment just from a marketing POV.
Then you want search engines to get the whole content (okay at least before they started to summarise everything but the kitchen sink) - that will always leave a loophole.
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.
I'd love to see some kind of cross-publication subscription service where I pay 20 bucks a month, and I can read, say, 100 articles from the 40 largest publications.
As a data point, whatever ublock origin on firefox does to remove overlays and ads seems to be also removing the paywall on that. Indian domestic news websites are rife with the most cancerous and absurd ads so I've found they're a good test for ublock origin on firefox.
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.
I agree with you in that we need to support the journalists doing the reporting. That's expensive, the companies that do it are mostly in dire financial straits, and most journalists themselves make very little money.
A universal subscription is incredibly difficult to set up logistically, especially wondering how you split up payments, who qualifies to be included, etc. Is it by traffic? That would incentivize clickbait even more.
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?
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.
If I ask a public httpd for the content of a URL and it sends it to me, it's my choice to render it how I want. The fact that I might choose to disregard various CSS and overlays and javascript delivered along with the text body content is up to me.
If somebody really wants to implement a fully effective paywall they're welcome to put their content behind a fully active content generated system that requires a unique username/password, same as signing in to an airline's mileage program/ticketing system, your personal paypal account or online banking, etc. Nobody is out there building paywall bypasses that work to render the content of somebody else's Citibank account.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
As a counterpoint, sure shut down your copy of it if you feel sufficiently threatened... But give away the 'fully baked' software ready to host, and somebody in a completely different jurisdiction could stand up a new copy of it.
Good luck to newspaper owners suing somebody who lives in a small town in Balochistan who finds a way to buy a .IS domain name with cryptocurrency and pay for KVM VM hosting in Moldova. Or somebody similar who has the financial resources to go host the thing in the same physical location/ISP where archive.is has server resources.
They have been caught altering snapshots, and that's why links to their snapshots are now banned from Wikipedia.
>In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.
> 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?
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)
Good guesses. Crawler spoofing and pulling content that’s only hidden client-side are both in the mix, but you’re right that they aren’t enough for the bigger sites. For what it’s worth, NYT works reliably right now and WSJ is hit or miss, so WSJ is still the hard one.
I’m going to stay a little vague on the rest, because anything I describe in detail here is something a publisher can patch by Monday. The general idea is to treat each site as its own problem: several methods per request, a check on whether the article actually came back (not just a teaser), and on to the next method if it didn’t.
On archive.is: yes, the CAPTCHA is the annoying part. Volume is low enough that it’s manageable, and it’s a last resort rather than the main path.
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.
Yes of course there's plenty of companies using GPL licensed software to run their own SaaS. I can think of off the top of my head just about every domain registrar in existence that has their own custom tech stack which almost certainly has tons of bits and pieces of GPL stuff in it, and they're certainly not releasing all their server-side/back-end code.
I would also be very doubtful that people who use bits and pieces of AGPL v3 software in their internal operations are ever going to release their custom modifications of it. In many cases the GPL licensed stuff is implemented in such a way that the user manipulating a publicly-accessible web user interface, a user interface accessible after signing in, or an API will never see or know the exact pieces running under the hood.
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.
Nothing is required and we shouldn't morally shame the less evolved who are still chasing fiat by pretending ownership of number strings.
But your actions do show who you are.
It makes sense economically since the part of the population using such services is so small and may have specific demographics that justify specific treatment just from a marketing POV.
Then you want search engines to get the whole content (okay at least before they started to summarise everything but the kitchen sink) - that will always leave a loophole.
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.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/two-seats-...
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.
Might have to strip articles down to just text and perhaps even use a few accounts to prevent watermarking that detects you.
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.
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.
That said, micropayments have been tried over and over again, and fail. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/micropayment...
A universal subscription is incredibly difficult to set up logistically, especially wondering how you split up payments, who qualifies to be included, etc. Is it by traffic? That would incentivize clickbait even more.
I've written about my plan/thoughts here: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
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.
If I ask a public httpd for the content of a URL and it sends it to me, it's my choice to render it how I want. The fact that I might choose to disregard various CSS and overlays and javascript delivered along with the text body content is up to me.
If somebody really wants to implement a fully effective paywall they're welcome to put their content behind a fully active content generated system that requires a unique username/password, same as signing in to an airline's mileage program/ticketing system, your personal paypal account or online banking, etc. Nobody is out there building paywall bypasses that work to render the content of somebody else's Citibank account.
There are surely ethical newspapers that use paywalls, but the majority in my country (Germany) are mostly about rage bait and/or facist dogwhistles
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.
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?
p.s. I've added it to SaaSHub too https://www.saashub.com/wallhop-alternatives
This is the way.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/col...
Also, you gon' get sued.
Good luck to newspaper owners suing somebody who lives in a small town in Balochistan who finds a way to buy a .IS domain name with cryptocurrency and pay for KVM VM hosting in Moldova. Or somebody similar who has the financial resources to go host the thing in the same physical location/ISP where archive.is has server resources.
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.
>In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
What protection is implemented to make sure of this? Or you leave the choice to the good moral of the users?
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)
I’m going to stay a little vague on the rest, because anything I describe in detail here is something a publisher can patch by Monday. The general idea is to treat each site as its own problem: several methods per request, a check on whether the article actually came back (not just a teaser), and on to the next method if it didn’t.
On archive.is: yes, the CAPTCHA is the annoying part. Volume is low enough that it’s manageable, and it’s a last resort rather than the main path.
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."
(My glibness stems from the fact that this has surely been litigated to death by now.)
Healthcare should be free.
Food and shelter should be free.
“Should” is doing a lot of work there. Meanwhile in reality, creating and organizing information requires scarce labor which deserves compensation.