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13 Feet Ladder

A self-hosted 12ft.io alternative that bypasses paywalls by fetching pages as GoogleBot, giving you clean access to paywalled articles from sites that 12ft.io…

  • Development
  • Tools & Utilities
A self-hosted 12ft.io alternative that bypasses paywalls by fetching pages as GoogleBot, giving you clean access to paywalled articles from sites that 12ft.io does not support.

Platform availability

Available on 1 of 9 platforms

  • Unraid
  • TrueNAS (not listed)
  • Umbrel (not listed)
  • ZimaOS (not listed)
  • Proxmox (not listed)
  • Helm (not listed)
  • Mac (not listed)
  • Windows (not listed)
  • Linux (not listed)

Health score?A 0-100 score computed nightly from four factors: maintained (40%: recent commits and steady activity), popular (25%: GitHub stars, log scale), easy to install (20%: platforms, install notes, setup guides, Docker image) and light to run (15%: minimum RAM, ARM support). When the source code has been checked, a fifth factor, security check (20%: automated scan for committed secrets, unsafe desktop-app settings, known-vulnerable dependencies and project hygiene; any serious finding caps it at 20), is added. Factors without data are left out and the rest are rescaled.

65/100 Good

Maintained
82last commit 26 days ago
Popular
734,309 GitHub stars
Easy to install
201 install platform, Docker image
Light to run
No data

Based on 3 of 4 factors.

Availability: platform listings confirmed today, links checked 7 days ago

GitHub stars
4,309
Open issues
4
Last commit
2026-09-17
Latest release
v0.5.0
License
MIT
Activity
rising

Checked 5 days ago - source: GitHub (wasi-master/13ft)

Resources & Compatibility

ARM (e.g. Raspberry Pi) is supported.

Checked 16 days ago - source: Docker Hub image tags and published docs

First-install notes

No first-install notes yet.

Alternatives (6)

  • Anti-Paywall - This extension will mangle your browser's requests to maximize the chances of bypassing paywalls.
  • Marreta - Marreta is a tool that removes access barriers and visual distractions.
  • PaywallBuster - Remove paywalls from news articles instantly.
  • PaywallSkip - Skip paywalls, access knowledge.
  • Unpaywall - Access free PDFs when viewing scholarly articles using a free browser extension for Chrome and Firefox from multiple devices.
  • smry - AI-powered article reader for clean reading, summaries, audio, highlights, annotations, article chat, and YouTube transcripts.

Checked 13 days ago - source: AlternativeTo

Common questions

How does 13Feet-Ladder access paywalled articles?

It impersonates GoogleBot so it requests the same crawler-served content. While fetching the target article it shows a loading or status page and can try multiple bypass methods if the primary approach fails.

How can I run 13Feet-Ladder with Docker Compose?

Clone the repository, enter the cloned directory, and run docker compose up. The image can also be pulled from DockerHub or ghcr.io.

Can I bind 13Feet-Ladder to a specific address and port?

Yes. In the venv/Flask workflow you can set FLASK_APP=app/portable.py and run flask run --host=127.0.0.1 --port=9982 to use a chosen bind address and port.

Can I create a Chrome bookmarklet for 13Feet-Ladder?

Yes. The project describes making a Chrome bookmarklet that performs the URL transformation by executing a small JavaScript snippet.

Answers sourced from github.com

Community

Collected 15 days ago - public community threads