Yet another Hacker News

WallHop – 12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement

110 points TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago 53 comments

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

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!

sergiotapia 1 hour ago | parent

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?

jen729w 1 hour ago | parent

Welcome to the Internet! You have so much to explore. Start here and just follow the links that interest you.

https://yahoo.com

;-)

ForOldHack 1 hour ago | parent

Yahoo.com's advertisers are a great source of drive bys, so much so, I scrape it for places to block.

sergiotapia 1 hour ago | parent

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 does that work?

jen729w 5 minutes ago | parent

Believe me, I know. I used to make my living selling a book. Guess how long that lasted.

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."

cobbzilla 1 hour ago | parent

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”

It’s basic caveat emptor stuff.

djfobbz 1 hour ago | parent

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.

varenc 8 minutes ago | parent

> ... 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)

SmashDan 1 hour ago | parent

This is great, straight into my bookmarks. I've been using archive.is but it's much more of a faff.

armchairhacker 1 hour ago | parent

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).

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

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!

forsalebypwner 1 hour ago | parent

Can you send me a link once it's up? Or otherwise link to your GitHub profile so people can follow you.

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

https://github.com/joshholly and my main portfolio site is wafflehacker.dev, I don't have my ladder fork open just yet.

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

Oh.. And follow me on substack! I write about all the cool stuff I build!

https://wafflehacker.substack.com , and I am on Dev.to , but I don't post as much there. https://dev.to/wafflehacker

pelagicAustral 1 hour ago | parent

OS means the people behind the service can patch (?)

sneak 1 hour ago | parent

> feel it’s morally expected

Why is reciprocation for a gift required? Gifts are given without obligation conferred.

komali2 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Brian_K_White 56 minutes ago | parent

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."

Why is reciprocation such a problem?

altmanaltman 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

lfraile 1 hour ago | parent

I wish it worked with www.irishexaminer.com. No luck :(

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks for bringing it to my attention! I will tinker around with it and try to find a bypass for this site and implement it into wallhop!

ForOldHack 1 hour ago | parent

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.

This is the way.

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

irishexaminer.com paywallbypass = implimented! Here's an example of a subscriber-only article here:

https://wallhop.io/https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/col...

pelagicAustral 1 hour ago | parent

This type of initiative should never be open source.

abrookewood 1 hour ago | parent

Why on Earth not??

entropy47 1 hour ago | parent

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).

pluc 57 minutes ago | parent

Also it's one thing to shut one instance down.. entirely another to shut down a whole bunch (not to mention private instances)

ForOldHack 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you! Thank you very much.

demibabs 1 hour ago | parent

Why did 12ft io go away?

zameermfm 1 hour ago | parent

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.

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

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.

skew-aberration 1 hour ago | parent

Shoutout to counsel reading this in discovery

zameermfm 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

Terr_ 1 hour ago | parent

There are several sides to this, ex:

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?

zameermfm 39 minutes ago | parent

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

Terr_ 26 minutes ago | parent

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?

icantevenhold 44 minutes ago | parent

Is it ethical for a newspaper to interview facist, antidemocratic politicians and then put the interview behind a paywall?

There are surely ethical newspapers that use paywalls, but the majority in my country (Germany) are mostly about rage bait and/or facist dogwhistles

iAMkenough 43 minutes ago | parent

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 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?

coffeefirst 25 minutes ago | parent

The problem is the math doesn’t work. Apple News is the closest thing to a real version of this, but no publication can survive on that alone.

Similar efforts never hit critical mass.

I have thoughts on what could work but that’s a longer topic for another day.

sauravt 1 hour ago | parent

can you expose an endpoint for “most requested articles” list, would be great

zeroq 1 hour ago | parent

TheWaffleHax 51 minutes ago | parent

That would be a good idea! Yeah I actually plan on adding it in.

pluc 1 hour ago | parent

That's cool.

Also, you gon' get sued.

TheWaffleHax 1 hour ago | parent

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.

behole 53 minutes ago | parent

Bless you!

Beijinger 52 minutes ago | parent

Install it now, thank me later: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads

TheWaffleHax 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

iAMkenough 52 minutes ago | parent

Looking forward to a Yunohost package to replace the 12ft.io one. https://appgenerator.yunohost.org

benwerd 47 minutes ago | parent

This is cool. Do you also have a version that provides free versions of paid SaaS apps? If not, why not?

stanislavb 25 minutes ago | parent

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

Cider9986 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

varenc 12 minutes ago | parent

> it doesn't have the recaptcha

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.