12ft Ladder icon
12ft Ladder icon

12ft Ladder

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

Cost / License

  • Free
  • Proprietary

Application type

Alerts

  • Discontinued

Platforms

  • Online
  • iPhone
  • iPad
12ft Ladder screenshot 1
12ft Ladder screenshot 2
12ft Ladder alternatives  
Discontinued

The News/Media Alliance has successfully secured the takedown of notorious paywall bypass website 12ft.io (“12ft Ladder”).

74likes
9alternatives
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12ft Ladder News & Activities

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Comments and Reviews

   
Top Positive Comment
Ryan Fader
3

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

Duncan Briggs
1

I tried to read Wirecutter via 12ft. Unfortunately, the images did not render correctly.

NejyCR
0

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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The ultimate list of apps/services for better Security, Privacy & Anonymity; Defense against Surveillance. What sets this list apart is its commitment to authenticity: No Sponsorship: Choices are made without commercial bias. No Affiliate Links: Purely user-benefit-focused. No Brand Deals: Independent and unbiased evaluations. Strict criteria ensure the tools prioritize user welfare and software quality: Opensource Preference: Prioritizing transparent and community-driven software. Cross-Platform Availability: Emphasizing tools usable across multiple systems. Active Development and Security Updates: Selecting only actively maintained tools with regular security enhancements. Proven Track Record: Requiring a history of reliability and positive feedback.
By Sooraj Sathyanarayanan199 appsUpdated

Official Links

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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.

12ft Ladder information

  • Developed by

    Thomas Millar

  • Licensing

    Proprietary and Free product.

  • Rating

    Average rating of 4.8

  • Alternatives

    9 alternatives listed

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  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Categories

News & Books, Web Browsers

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Our users have written 3 comments and reviews about 12ft Ladder, and it has gotten 74 likes

12ft Ladder was added to AlternativeTo by Ian Dorfman on and this page was last updated .