12ft.io shut down in July 2025. Taken offline after the News/Media Alliance pressured its webhost. The NMA called it 'illegal circumvention technology.'

Best 12ft.io Alternative

Name: SMRY
Author: SMRY

12ft.io was shut down in 2025. SMRY is the best 12ft.io alternative for reading articles.

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Feature-by-feature comparison

Article extraction

Extract clean article text from any URL

Was available (now offline)

Clean reader mode

Distraction-free article layout

11 themes, custom typography

Basic (stripped HTML)

YouTube transcripts

Read YouTube videos as text

Last updated March 2026

Pricing comparison

12ft.io is no longer available. Here's what it used to cost vs what SMRY costs today.

Free

per month (annual)

Start free

Free

no longer available

Shut down July 2025

Why SMRY is the best 12ft.io alternative

12ft.io is gone. Here's why SMRY is the best replacement.

Actually online

12ft.io was taken down by legal action in July 2025. SMRY is still running and actively developed.

AI-powered reading

12ft.io just stripped paywalls. SMRY adds AI summaries, chat, text-to-speech, and a beautiful reader with 11 themes.

More reliable extraction

12ft.io used a single method (crawler spoofing) that publishers easily blocked. SMRY uses multiple extraction paths with an XGBoost classifier to pick the best result.

YouTube support

Read and chat with YouTube video transcripts — something 12ft.io never offered.

Frequently asked questions

12ft.io was taken offline on July 14, 2025 after the News/Media Alliance pressured its webhost to lock the domain. The NMA stated they would 'continue to take similar actions against other purveyors of unauthorized paywall bypassing technologies.'

No. 12ft.io was a simple proxy that spoofed search engine crawlers. SMRY is a full reading app with AI summaries, chat, text-to-speech, highlights, and 11 reading themes. SMRY uses multiple extraction methods including direct fetch and Diffbot.

SMRY operates as an AI reading assistant, not a paywall bypass proxy. We extract publicly available content and add AI features on top. Our approach is fundamentally different from 12ft.io's crawler spoofing.

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