Substack & Medium Reader — Read Articles Without Paywalls Free

Yes. Paste any Medium article URL above and we load it via a mirror service that doesn't enforce Medium's paywall. You see the full article — same text, same images, same links — just no signup prompt, no 'Become a member' lock. Works on articles behind the 'Sign up to read for free' or 'Already a member?' prompts, and on member-only articles that you have access to.

We route your request through a third-party service (like Freedium) that mirrors public Medium articles without enforcing the paywall. The article content is the same — no reformatting, no rewriting, just the original article unblocked. From your perspective it looks like the article just loaded normally. The mirror service has been operating for years without legal issues because the underlying content is publicly accessible via the article's URL.

Good uses: one-off articles a friend linked, headlines you want to check before committing to subscribe, research where you need to read 20 articles in a topic and can't justify 20 subscriptions, archived articles whose authors have moved platforms. Not great uses: regularly reading a publication you get value from (the writers don't get paid for your reads when you bypass), avoiding supporting writers you actually like, never subscribing to anything. A pragmatic middle ground: use the paywall bypass for casual reading, but subscribe ($5/month on Medium) if you read more than 2-3 articles per week from the same author or publication. The bypass is for occasional reading, not a permanent replacement for membership.

Medium makes most of its money from paying members, so articles are written to be locked. About 60% of Medium articles are member-only. The paywall is enforced client-side: when you load a member-only article without a Medium cookie that proves you're a member, Medium shows you the first ~30% of the article and then a signup wall. The rest of the article is on Medium's servers but not delivered to your browser. The bypass works because Medium's own player still serves the full content via the public API endpoint (which is how their RSS feed works, and how their embed widgets work). Mirror services use this same endpoint to fetch articles without the membership cookie, then return the full content to you. For articles you don't have access to (truly private publications, articles removed for ToS violations), the bypass won't work — the content isn't on the public API.

We don't log the URLs you submit. We don't store the articles. We don't require account creation. We don't track which articles you read. The mirror service sees the article URL (to fetch the content) and your IP (to send it back). For most use cases that's fine. If privacy is critical (journalism, sensitive research), use a VPN and clear cookies between sessions. We don't share your reading history with anyone. We don't build a profile of you. The site runs without tracking pixels or third-party analytics on article pages.

Yes — that's the main use case. Articles marked 'Member-only' or 'Available to paying members only' load fully when you paste the URL. Articles behind a hard paywall that you don't have any access to (rare — usually means the author deleted the post) won't load.

Yes — after the article loads, click the 'Save as PDF' or 'Save as Markdown' button. PDF includes images and preserves formatting. Markdown is cleaner for note-taking apps and AI workflows. Both work offline once downloaded.

Yes — Freedium is the original mirror service we use. We also have fallback mirrors in case Freedium is down. We don't charge for what Freedium offers free; we just provide a cleaner interface and the option to save as PDF/Markdown.

Yes — same tool, same process. Paste any Substack post URL (looks like author.substack.com/p/title) and click Read. The article loads in distraction-free mode without Substack's header, sidebar, subscribe popups, or footer promotions.