You clicked a Medium link, started reading, and hit the wall: “You’ve read all your free member-only stories this month.” If you don’t want to pay five dollars a month for the rest, here is the simple way around it.
Use Medium Free
I built a small tool called Medium Free. Open it here, paste the Medium link, and the full story loads. No account, no membership, no payment.
That’s the whole flow:
- 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.
It works on member-only stories, the ones that normally stop you a few paragraphs in.
Why this works
Medium’s paywall isn’t a vault. It’s a tollbooth. It exists to meter access for a subscription, not to lock the words away. The article text is still there. The wall just decides whether to show it to you based on whether you paid.
Medium Free reads the story the way a search engine or preview does, then hands you the full text. Nothing is broken into, and nothing is stored.
A note for writers
If you write on Medium, none of this hurts you the way it might seem to. The paywall was never really protecting your words. It rents you distribution, and your work already lives on someone else’s terms, ranked by someone else’s algorithm. The thing worth owning is the audience, not the wall. That’s why I keep my own writing on a site I control and send it outward second.
That’s it
Paste your link into Medium Free and read the story. If a paywalled Medium article brought you here, that should save you the five dollars and the hassle.
Building a small tool that quietly reframes a bigger problem is the kind of work I enjoy most. If you have one in mind, email me.
