Yes, it is 100% legal.

For news articles, Spaywall effectively allows you to bypass paywalls in a way that does not interfere with the original page. In fact we prefer not to say we "remove paywalls", because our servers never talk to the original news site. Our algorithm searches for a paywall-free archived version in various internet archives and redirects you if one is found. We don't own or have any association with these archives, but simply display their content on this site without making you leave the page.

For research papers, we are searching a database containing millions of scientific and academic papers and articles that have been uploaded with full permission of the authors and original publishers. On average, about 50% of the scientific literature is available (often called Open Access). Though these papers are freely available, it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, and it's easy to waste a lot of time. That's why we added Spaywall Research to our search capability.

No, and no paywall service can claim to always work. First, some news outlets use what's called a hard paywall. A hard paywall means that casual visitors don't get any free articles — you must pay and log in to see even one article. Because these are never seen without the paywall, they can never be archived.

Many news outlets use a soft paywall instead, meaning a user can read a few free articles per month before being restricted. For these soft paywalls, we still need a paywall-free version to get picked up by the archiving crawlers. If you tried to search the archives yourself, you might find over 95% have the paywall archived with it. It's a bit of a needle in a haystack problem. That means articles sometimes need to be a few days old to have been crawled by the archiving sites (though we have seen same-day news work many times).

Our algorithm strives to find an archived article that is paywall-free. It's pretty good, but it can never be 100%. Our own records indicate anywhere from 50 to 60% of articles will work on the free plan, up to 80 to 90% of articles on the Premium plan. This is an average over all news sites and so this will differ when looking at just a single news source. Your mileage may vary, and performance is not guaranteed.

Despite this (and we're clearly biased!), we believe Spaywall's non-perfect performance (🤞) is still an incredible value versus paying for every subscription. However, if you frequent a particular news outlet, please consider directly supporting the journalism you love. 💗

No, although about half of the scientific research papers are indexed under Open Access principles, and more are being added all the time.

Yes, and we never charge on a per-article basis for access. Our service consists of searching through millions of papers in a fairly-extensive database. You may use our service to access papers for free anytime during off-peak hours. We do charge a reasonable fee for the ability to use our services during peak hours.

Yes! We created the Spaywall website to work with any device.

For convenience on desktop devices, get the free browser extension for Chrome↗, Firefox↗, or Edge↗.

We are working on a native mobile app to facilitate nightly-news doomscrolling. 🙃

All-hours Access means you get access to news and research 24/7, even during peak service hours. Naturally, these times fluctuate based on usage. To avoid being restricted, please upgrade to a Premium plan.

Spaywall operated for its first 5 years on a completely free, donation-based model. Over that time, operations grew to support over 45,000 weekly active users of the site. We wanted to keep running the site as it was, but unfortunately, the number of users who donated was not enough to operate the site any longer.

Facing a likely shutdown of the site, we searched for alternative business models that would allow us to avoid that fate. We pivoted to a Freemium model, which includes basic features for free, and adds premium features for a low price. We added support for additional archive sources to increase news coverage, and branched out to support academic researchers with our Open Access search feature for research papers. With this pivot, we also limited the free plan to non-peak hours only.

We understand that any change is hard. We hope you understand that it does take time and money to operate a site like this, and these changes are necessary to make Spaywall financially sustainable. We hope if you are interested in our Premium features such as access at all times, or additional news archives, that you will consider upgrading. Our plans are priced very low compared to subscribing to several traditional digital newspapers. Thank you for your support.