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WallHop

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

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This is 1 of 78 launches in privacy and censorship circumvention tools — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →

65 other launches read as similar to this one →

Details

External ID
50038634
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
WallHop
Website domain
wallhop.io
Launched
Oct. 11, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
286
Upvotes percentile
0.98
Tags
—

Description

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!

Enrichment

Niche
privacy and censorship circumvention tools
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Workflow automation
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
paywall bypass tool for web readers
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While fetching archived pages via the Wayback Machine or spoofing Googlebot User-Agents can be built quickly, evading dynamic paywalls, bot-detection (Cloudflare/Akamai), and anti-scraping countermeasures across modern media sites is an ongoing cat-and-mouse game.

What it would actually take: Architecture consists of a headless Chromium farm (Puppeteer/Playwright) paired with residential proxy rotation, fallback queries to public web archives, and custom DOM-sanitizing extractors (Readability.js). The hard part is constantly updating evasion logic to bypass sophisticated anti-bot fingerprinting and client-side JavaScript paywalls across hundreds of distinct publication sites. Requires dedicated reverse-engineering and anti-scraping infrastructure maintenance.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: archive.is, 12ft.io, Magnolia1234

Concerns raised: Legal risk and cease-and-desist letters, Fails on sites with hard paywalls like Reuters, Falls back to archive.is instead of bypassing, Publishers can easily block crawler spoofing

Feature requests: Micropayments integration via Lightning or L402

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 65 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #2 of 66 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 343 days after the earliest competitor.

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