12ft Ladder

Name: 12ft Ladder
Rating: 4.8 (9 reviews)

74 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.

Cost / License

Free
Proprietary

Application type

Paywall Remover

Alerts

Discontinued

Platforms

Online
iPhone
iPad

12ft Ladder alternatives

Discontinued

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

74likes

9alternatives

1article

Features

Properties

Lightweight
Privacy focused

Features

Ad-free
No registration required
Paywall

12ft Ladder News & Activities

Highlights All activities

Recent activities

shaysio liked 12ft Ladder
about 2 months ago
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3 months ago
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4 months ago
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8 months ago
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9 months ago
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10 months ago
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12 months ago

Comments and Reviews

Top Positive Comment

Ryan Fader

★★★★★

Oct 13, 2022

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

Duncan Briggs

CommentJun 22, 2025

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

NejyCR

★★★★★

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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Official Links

There are no links for this app, or they've been disabled.

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.