Free · no sign-up · no paywall tricks
Clean Article Reader
Paste a public article link and read the text — no banners, no pop-ups, no sidebar noise. Word count and reading time come with it.
Member-only articles stay locked. This tool reads what a site serves publicly and says so plainly when it cannot.
Read an article cleanly
One link, one column of text, nothing moving.
How it works
Any publicly readable article URL — news, blog, documentation, newsletter archive.
One ordinary request, exactly as your browser would send it. No crawler impersonation, no archives, no cookies.
Menus, ads, promos, comment blocks and sidebars go; paragraphs, headings and quotes stay in order.
Word count and reading time at 200 words per minute tell you whether to start now.
If a site serves only the opening paragraphs, that is what you get — clearly labelled as partial.
You get a plain statement that the article is locked. Nothing is extracted, nothing is worked around.
What you get
An editorial serif with a printed margin rule and a pilcrow marking where the body starts.
Word count straight from the extracted text; reading time rounded up at 200 wpm.
Every result is labelled public, partly public or locked — never a pretend "full text".
Author and publication date when the page declares them in its metadata.
The page is fetched, parsed in memory and dropped. No file is written, no history kept.
20 second timeout and a 5 MB ceiling keep a bad link from ever becoming a hanging request.
FAQ
Can it get me past a paywall?
No, and it never will. It reads only what a site serves to any visitor, then tells you plainly when the rest is member-only.
Why was my link blocked?
Some sites refuse ordinary requests (HTTP 403) or ask you to sign in. The reader reports the refusal instead of guessing at the text.
Some of the article is missing
Then the site did not serve it — often because the body loads through JavaScript after the page arrives, or because part of it sits behind a gate.
Is my reading history stored?
No. Nothing is written to disk and nothing is kept between requests; the URL exists only for the duration of the extraction.
How is reading time calculated?
Words in the extracted text divided by 200 words per minute, rounded up, with a minimum of one minute.