You open Medium, find an interesting article, and start reading. Right in the middle, you hit a paywall telling you to subscribe. If you prefer not to pay five dollars a month for the rest, there is a simple workaround. In this article, I will explain how you can read any member-only story without an account.
Update (October 1, 2026): The tool now parses articles from other publications as well. If a website is cluttered or hard to read, you can paste the link to strip away the mess and read the text in a clean, distraction-free format.
Use Medium Free
I built a small tool called Medium Free. Paste the Medium link, and the full story loads immediately. You do not need an account or a subscription.
The process takes seconds:
- Copy the URL of the Medium article you want to read.
- Go to Medium Free.
- Paste the link and press the button.
- Read the full article.
This works on member-only stories, the ones that normally cut off after a few paragraphs.
Why the workaround functions
Medium needs search engines to index its stories, so the server delivers the full article text in the initial page response rather than locking it behind server-side authentication. In a normal browser, client-side scripts inspect your cookies and reading history, then cut off the text to prompt a paid subscription. The barrier runs in your browser, not on the server.
Medium Free requests the article directly without browser cookies or tracking tokens, receiving the same public markup that Medium sends to search crawlers. It extracts the clean text, strips away the paywall scripts, and displays the story without storing user data or bypassing encryption.
A note for writers
If you publish on Medium, tools like this do not harm your work the way it might appear. The paywall was never truly protecting your words. It merely rents you distribution. Your work already lives on someone else’s terms, ranked by their algorithm.
The audience is the asset worth owning, not the paywall. For this reason, I keep my own writing on a site I control and syndicate it outward later.
Try it yourself
Paste your link into Medium Free and read the story. If a paywalled Medium article brought you here, this tool will save you the five dollars and the hassle.
