by Charles Miller

Paywall is the term applied to the practice that creates restrictions on access to certain web sites by requiring visitors to pay a fee to use the site. Quite a few news websites have paywalls to restrict their articles to paying customers. I personally pay for subscriptions to some web sites I visit regularly. And from time to time I stumble onto a site with a paywall that says something like: "To read this article, please log into your account or click on the button below to get 24-hour member access for $1."

Being asked to pay a one dollar admission fee to use a web site seems quite reasonable, and I have done that, however; I just landed on a website with a paywall that elevated my blood pressure. The site promised it would cost "only pennies a day" so I clicked. The "pennies a day" turned out to be 23 pennies which was okay with me, but that was listed as $6.99 USD per month. That was not enough to put me off entirely because paying for a single one-month subscription of $6.99 would have been worth it to access the information I wanted, and a reasonable show of support for the web site even if I never visited it again. What did put me off was that there was no way to subscribe for only one month because the price was not really $6.99 per month and to sign up I would have had to prepay a year for the "special" price of $83.88. At this point my mind was made up that I would not subscribe, yet I still took a few seconds to skim over the rest of the sign-up page. In the fine print it said that at the end of the subscription my credit card would be used to automatically renew for another year "at the current renewal rate." I sure did not want to be on the hook for $83.88 every year, and the legalistic wording of the fine print made me just curious enough to wonder what the "current renewal rate" was and if it was different from the $83.88 "special" rate. When I finally found it, the "current renewal rate" for the second year was different; as in $159.99.

Please remember I was willing to pay a dollar or even $6.99 in order to have access to the one web page in which I was interested, but the grubby attempt to trick me into paying $159.99 yearly seriously annoyed me. It aggravated me so much I will now tell how I bypassed the paywall.

The web site address, also known as Universal Resource Locator (URL), appearing in the address bar of your web browser you are using right now to read this article should look like "https://www.lokkal.com/sma/magazine/ 2025/february/paywall.php". Look for that at the top of your screen. After copying that URL, point your browser to "archive.ph" and paste that URL into the "Saved from" box then click on [Search]. If the page you want to see has already been archived it will be displayed immediately. If not, the archive.ph page will attempt to locate and archive it for you then display the page sans paywall.

The "Archive.today" web site is a bit of a mystery. It is located in the Philippines or the Netherlands (???) and is one of many online organizations that seek to archive and preserve much of the ephemeral content found online. How it is able to tunnel through the paywalls of so many paid websites is still a mystery to me, but it works.

In a few cases there is an even simpler way to avoid the paywall. Try pressing the [F9] key on your keyboard to see if going into reader mode jumps you past the paywall. Mac, iPhone, or iPad users just press the Reader View button (which looks like a page icon) in the URL bar. Google's Chrome browser is the only major browser that does not have reader mode, but an independent developer created a free extension named "Reader Mode" that you may download and install.

I intend to continue paying to subscribe to several websites I visit regularly and to others that are reasonable; that is only fair. But if I encounter a paywall using deceptive sales tactics I will either use the archive.ph site to circumvent the paywall, or I will just go without visiting that web site.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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