My own custom 12ft.io replacement. Contribute to wasi-master/13ft development by creating an account on GitHub.
A site similar to 12ft.io but is self hosted and works with websites that 12ft.io doesn't work with.
How does it work?
It pretends to be GoogleBot (Google's web crawler) and gets the same content that google will get. Google gets the whole page so that the content of the article can be indexed properly and this takes advantage of that.
If you're on Firefox on desktop/laptop, check out Bypass Paywall [0]. It was removed from the firefox add-on store due to a DMCA claim [1], but can be manually installed (and auto updates) from gitlab. The dev even provides instructions on how to add custom filters to uBlock Origin [2], so you don't have to add another extension but still get some benefit.
It amazes me that all it takes is just changing user agent to Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) and it can bypass paywalls on many sites? I thought those sites would try harder (e.g. checking if the ip address is truly belong to google), but apparently not.
Checking ip ownership is a moving target more likely to result in outcomes these sites don’t want (accidentally blocking google bots and preventing results from appearing on google).
Checking useragent is cheap, easier, unlikely to break (for this purpose, anyway) and the percentage of folks who know how to bypass this check is relatively slim, with a pretty small financial impact.
If you're on Android and use Firefox, you can use the Disable JavaScript extension to disable JS on sites with paywalls, like NYtimes. While not perfect, it works remarkably well.