Medium paywall bypass

Skill ratacat/ratacats-skills/skills/medium-paywall-bypass

Read paywalled Medium articles in full, including Medium-hosted publications (towardsdatascience.com, betterprogramming.pub, etc.).From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add ratacat/ratacats-skills --skill medium-paywall-bypass

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

8 stars8 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

2.7 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Medium Paywall Bypass

Overview

Fetch paywalled Medium articles using free mirror services. Try services in order until one works.

Service Priority

Service	URL Pattern	WebFetch	curl	Notes
Freedium	`https://freedium.cfd/{encoded_url}`	Yes	Yes	Best option, returns content directly
Archive.today	`https://archive.today/latest/{raw_url}`	No	Maybe	Often requires captcha
RemovePaywalls	`https://removepaywalls.com/{raw_url}`	No	No	Redirect page only, needs browser
ReadMedium	`https://readmedium.com/en/{encoded_url}`	No	No	Returns 403 programmatically

{encoded_url} = URL-encoded (slashes become %2F, @ becomes %40, etc.)
{raw_url} = Original URL as-is

For Claude Code: Use Freedium via WebFetch. Other services require browser interaction.

Workflow

1. User provides Medium URL
2. Try Freedium first via WebFetch
3. If blocked/empty, try next service
4. Extract and present article content

Example Usage

Given: https://medium.com/@user/some-article-abc123

WebFetch (recommended):

URL: https://freedium.cfd/https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F%40user%2Fsome-article-abc123
Prompt: Extract the full article content

curl fallback:

curl -sL "https://freedium.cfd/https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F%40user%2Fsome-article-abc123"

Medium-Hosted Domains

These domains use Medium's paywall system:

medium.com, *.medium.com
towardsdatascience.com
betterprogramming.pub
levelup.gitconnected.com
javascript.plainenglish.io
uxdesign.cc
hackernoon.com
codeburst.io
itnext.io
proandroiddev.com
infosecwriteups.com

Common Issues

Problem	Solution
Freedium down	Try alternative mirror: `freedium-mirror.cfd`
Article not found	Article may be too new to be cached
Garbled HTML	Use WebFetch with prompt: "Extract the article text and format as markdown"
403/blocked	Try curl with `dangerouslyDisableSandbox: true`

Quick Reference

# URL encoding in Python
from urllib.parse import quote
encoded = quote(url, safe='')

# For WebFetch tool
freedium_url = f"https://freedium.cfd/{quote(medium_url, safe='')}"