freeread 0.3.0

Read paywalled articles in your terminal

freeread 📰

Read paywalled articles directly in your terminal. No browser. No ads. No friction.

freeread https://www.nytimes.com/some-article

How it works

freeread tries multiple bypass methods in order until one works:

• ph archive.ph (public cache)
• 12ft 12ft.io proxy
• ref Google Referer header trick
• cookie cookie-clearing (metered paywalls)
• http Scrapling HTTP fetch (curl_cffi impersonation)
• bot Googlebot user-agent spoof
• stealth Scrapling headless browser plus Cloudflare bypass
• dynamic Scrapling Playwright render (JS-heavy)
• wb Wayback Machine (slowest)

Scrapling methods are optional. Install with pip install freeread[scrapling].

Install

Requirements: Python 3.10+

pipx (recommended for most users)

Installs freeread as an isolated CLI tool. No virtualenv setup, no conflicts.

pipx install freeread

# With Scrapling-powered methods
pipx install "freeread[scrapling]"

Install pipx first if needed: pip install pipx or brew install pipx

uv (recommended for developers)

uv is a fast Rust-based Python package manager.

# Install uv (one-time)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# Install freeread
uv pip install freeread

# With Scrapling-powered methods
uv pip install "freeread[scrapling]"

# Or run directly without installing
uv run freeread <url>

pip (classic)

pip install freeread

# With Scrapling-powered methods
pip install "freeread[scrapling]"

If you hit externally-managed-environment on Ubuntu/Debian, add --break-system-packages or use pipx/uv instead.

Run from source

git clone https://github.com/GHesericsu/freeread
cd freeread
pip install -e .
freeread <url>

Usage

# Read any article
freeread https://www.wsj.com/some-article

# Clean markdown output (good for piping to an LLM)
freeread https://www.theatlantic.com/... --md > article.md

# Force a specific method
freeread https://ft.com/article --method ph
freeread https://ft.com/article --method cookie
freeread https://ft.com/article --method stealth

# Use a proxy (optional)
freeread https://ft.com/article --proxy "$DECODO_MOBILE_PROXY"

# Use your own session cookies (for hard paywalls like WSJ Live)
freeread https://wsj.com/... --cookies ./wsj-cookies.txt

# Raw text output (no rich formatting, good for piping)
freeread https://nytimes.com/article --raw

# List available methods
freeread --list-methods

Limitations

• Hard server-side paywalls (FT, WSJ 2024+) may not work if no archive exists
• Some sites actively block archive services
• Brand new articles may not have an archive yet — try --method bot first

Notes

This tool only accesses publicly cached or archived versions of articles. It does not circumvent authentication or access content that was never publicly available.

License

MIT