How to read paywalled news for free — legally
There are legitimate ways past a paywall, and there are ways that are just theft with extra steps. This is the honest version: what works, what it costs, and where the line is.
You click a promising headline. You read two paragraphs. A panel slides up and asks for $4 a month, and the rest of the sentence is gone.
Search for a solution and you will find plenty of advice about clearing cookies, opening private windows, or pasting the URL into archive sites. Some of it works. Most of it is circumventing an access control, which is a different thing from reading for free — and worth being clear-eyed about before you build a habit on it.
This is the honest version. What is genuinely free, what those methods actually do, and where the line sits.
First: not everything is paywalled
The most useful thing to know is that a large amount of serious journalism has no paywall at all, and people routinely bounce off three paywalls in a row without realizing there was a free option covering the same story.
Public broadcasters are funded by other means and generally publish freely. NPR in the United States, the BBC in the United Kingdom, CBC in Canada.
Wire-fed coverage appears in many outlets at once. A single agency report can run on a dozen sites, and they are not all behind the same wall.
Free-to-read commercial outlets exist in every market, and some of the best-resourced newsrooms in the world make most of their output free.
Foreign outlets covering your story. This is the one people forget. A story about American politics is also covered by British, Irish, Canadian and Australian outlets, in English, often with no paywall — and frequently with useful distance from the domestic argument.
The practical version of this: before working around a wall, spend ten seconds checking whether someone else covered the same thing openly. Usually someone did.
The methods people actually use, and what they are
Private browsing and clearing cookies
Works on: metered paywalls only. What it is: a metered paywall counts your articles in a cookie. Clear it, and the counter resets. Where it sits: this is a grey area rather than a bright line. You are not breaking anything; you are declining to keep a counter the publisher put on your device. Most publishers know exactly how easy it is and accept the leakage.
It does nothing at all against a hard paywall, where the article is never sent to your browser in the first place.
Reader modes and extensions that strip overlays
Works on: paywalls implemented badly. What it is: some sites send you the whole article and then cover it with a panel. Removing the panel reveals text you already received. Where it sits: further into grey. The publisher intended to restrict access and failed technically. That the lock is flimsy does not mean it was left open on purpose.
Archive and cache sites
Works on: many paywalls, including hard ones. What it is: a third party fetched the page under conditions you do not have and republished it. Where it sits: past the line, in most readings. You are reading a copy that exists specifically to defeat the publisher's access control. It is also unreliable and legally awkward for the archive.
Actually subscribing
Works on: everything. What it is: the thing the paywall is asking for. Where it sits: obviously fine, and worth saying out loud — if you read one outlet several times a week, the subscription is genuinely cheaper than the time you spend routing around it.
The methods that are free and unambiguous
Your public library
The most under-used option in this entire article. Many public library cards include free digital access to major newspapers, often through services like PressReader or a library's own database subscriptions. You are reading a licensed copy that the library paid for. There is nothing grey about it whatsoever.
If you have a library card and have never checked what it includes, check. It is frequently the single best answer on this page.
Publishers' own free tiers
A number of outlets keep breaking news, obituaries, live blogs or opinion outside the wall permanently. Some open all coverage of major events. Following an outlet's free RSS feed shows you exactly what they publish openly, with no counting involved.
Newsletters
Many paywalled outlets run free newsletters containing substantial reporting. It is a marketing channel, which is precisely why it is free and unambiguous.
Reading somewhere else
The point from the top of this article, stated once more because it is the one that generalizes: if a story matters, more than one newsroom covered it. Reading the free one is not a workaround, it is just reading.
How GetMyNews handles this
GetMyNews reads publishers' public RSS feeds — the feeds they publish deliberately, for exactly this purpose. Each card shows the headline, the summary the publisher syndicated, the image and the outlet. Tap it and the publisher's own page opens in your phone's browser.
That last detail matters more than it looks. Because the article opens in your browser, you arrive with your own session. If you subscribe to a paper, you are signed in and you see the piece you paid for — layout, extras and all. An app that fetched the page separately and re-displayed the text would strip your subscription along with the publisher's ads, and hand you the locked version instead.
We also tag every one of the 1,200 feeds by access type, so the app knows which sources are open, which are metered and which sit behind a hard paywall — and it puts the freely readable ones in front of you first.
That is the whole design: take you to the source, with your own access, and lead with the newsrooms you can actually read.
The part nobody wants to hear
Reporting costs money. A foreign bureau costs money, a court reporter sitting through a three-week trial costs money, and a public-records lawsuit costs a great deal of money. Advertising alone stopped covering it years ago, which is exactly why the walls went up.
So the honest summary is this: use the free sources, because there are far more of them than most people realize. Use your library card, because you already paid for it. Read a foreign outlet when the domestic ones are locked, because distance is often an improvement. And if you find yourself hitting the same wall week after week, that is not a technical problem to solve — it is a subscription you actually want.
More on the international angle: how to follow world news in 2026 without drowning in apps. And if the sign-up wall bothers you as much as the pay wall: best news apps without an account.