WallHop lands on Hacker News as indie successor to defunct 12ft.io paywall bypass

WallHop, a free tool for reading articles behind paywalls, has reached Hacker News' front page, pitched by its creator as a direct replacement for 12ft.io — the once-ubiquitous bypass that went offline in July 2025 after the News Media Alliance announced it had taken the service down. A companion write-up by the tool's author on dev.to, published the same day, explains how it works, where it fails, and the iPhone integration the author considers its best feature.

What WallHop does

According to the dev.to post, the creator — a full-stack engineer who publishes as wafflehacker and introduces himself as Josh — built the tool after noticing he kept receiving links he could not open, mostly on his phone. WallHop takes an article URL and returns the readable text without the paywall overlay, ads or newsletter prompts, with no signup and no browser extension. It grew out of a smaller side project hosted on a personal subdomain into something he now uses daily.

There are four ways to use it: paste a link into a box on wallhop.io; prefix any URL with the site's address, the same muscle memory 12ft trained into its users; drag a bookmarklet onto the bookmarks bar for desktop; or call the raw and API endpoints for scripting. The Hacker News post lists the same set, alongside an iPhone Shortcut the author says lets readers hop an article straight from the share menu.

The author reports testing it against most major news outlets, many local papers, and Medium's member-only posts — a category 12ft never handled.

How paywalls leak, and how WallHop exploits it

The dev.to write-up sorts paywalls into four types. Client-side overlays send the whole article in the HTML and let JavaScript hide it — the kind 12ft beat by stripping scripts. Metered paywalls count free articles in cookies or local storage, so a clean request often looks like a first-time visitor. Crawler exceptions serve full text to search engine bots, though larger sites increasingly verify that a request claiming to be a crawler really is one. Hard server-side paywalls never send the article body unless the reader is logged in and paying.

A single site can mix these approaches, and publishers change them without notice. That is why 12ft's single-trick design had no answer once publishers learned to block it. WallHop instead chains several methods per request: it fetches the page with the technique most likely to work for that site, checks whether the response actually contains the article rather than a teaser plus a login wall, and moves to the next method if it does not. If every method fails, it falls back to an archived copy from archive.is, then strips scripts, overlays and ads before returning a readable page. The code started from everywall/ladder, an open-source request-rewriting proxy, and has been heavily modified since.

That verification step matters more than it sounds, the author notes: many paywalled pages return an HTTP 200 with perfectly valid HTML that simply lacks the story, and detecting that is what makes the fallback chain work.

A shared Medium login

No bypass technique worked on Medium, so the author took an unusual route. He already pays five dollars a month for a Medium subscription, and he wired his own session cookie into WallHop — effectively sharing his personal, paying login with everyone who uses the tool.

One tap from the share sheet

Because most paywalled links arrive in texts and group chats, and editing a URL on an iPhone is awkward, the creator built an Apple Shortcut. Once installed, sharing an article and tapping WallHop grabs the URL, builds the link and opens the cleaned article in Safari. It works from Safari, in-app browsers and most apps that can share a link, with no App Store download and no account. The author says this is how he uses WallHop most of the time.

The limits

The write-up is candid about failure modes. Hard server-side paywalls remain mostly out of reach, with archived copies as the only hope — and not every article has one. Publishers keep updating their setups, and while the fallback chain absorbs much of the churn, the author says he probes individual sites by hand when users report breakage. The tool is for reading only and never touches user accounts.

Why it matters

12ft.io's takedown removed a tool that had become a reflex for a large audience, and WallHop's quick climb to Hacker News' front page suggests that demand never went away. The project is also a compact illustration of the arms race between publishers and readers: as long as full article text is shipped to browsers or crawlers, tools like this will find the leaks, and the durable publisher fix — holding content server-side — is exactly what these bypasses cannot touch.

There is an ethical caveat woven in, too. Both the site and the write-up carry a note urging readers to subscribe to outlets they visit daily, framing the tool as being for one-off articles from sites a reader will never return to. And the Medium arrangement, which leans on one person's paid account to serve all users, is a fragile shortcut whose lifespan depends entirely on the publisher's tolerance.