https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/two-seats-...

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.

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.

p.s. I've added it to SaaSHub too https://www.saashub.com/wallhop-alternatives

What protection is implemented to make sure of this? Or you leave the choice to the good moral of the users?

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.

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.

Also, you gon' get sued.

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!

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?

Similar efforts never hit critical mass.

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

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?

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)