12ft Ladder icon
12ft Ladder icon

12ft Ladder

 55 likes

Effortlessly access paywalled articles by prepending 12ft.io/ to any URL. 12ft Ladder uses Google's cached versions to show you unblocked content, circumventing paywalls and offering immediate article access without subscriptions.

12ft Ladder screenshot 1

License model

  • Free • Proprietary

Application type

Platforms

  • Online
  • iPhone
  • iPad
12ft Ladder screenshot 1
12ft Ladder screenshot 2
12ft Ladder alternatives  
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4.8 / 5 Avg rating (16)
55 likes
2comments
10 alternatives
0 news articles

Features

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Properties

  1.  Lightweight
  2.  Privacy focused

Features

  1.  Ad-free
  2.  No registration required

12ft Ladder News & Activities

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12ft Ladder information

  • Developed by

    Thomas Millar

  • Licensing

    Proprietary and Free product.

  • Rating

    Average rating of 4.8 (16 ratings)

  • Alternatives

    10 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Categories

Web Browsers, News & Books

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Our users have written 2 comments and reviews about 12ft Ladder, and it has gotten 55 likes

12ft Ladder was added to AlternativeTo by Ian Dorfman on Jan 17, 2022 and this page was last updated Feb 4, 2025.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Ryan Fader
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Top positive comment •Oct 13, 2022

Bypassing paywalls in a minimalist readable environment. Very fast and reliable.

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NejyCR
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Review •Aug 26, 2023

Begs the question of "what's the point, and how many sites are like this?" after I discovered NY Times was disabled by the site.

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What is 12ft Ladder?

Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.

What?

Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page, and we'll try our best to remove the paywall and get you access to the article.

Why?

I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.

You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter. This is why I created 12ft.io.

How does it work?

The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.

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