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13Feet-Ladder

A site similar to 12ft.io but is self hosted and works with websites that 12ft.io doesn't work with.

  • Tools & Utilities
A site similar to 12ft.io but is self hosted and works with websites that 12ft.io doesn't work with. What is this? This is a simple self hosted server that has a simple but powerful interface to block ads, paywalls, and other nonsense. Specially for sites like medium, new york times which have paid articles that you normally cannot read. Now I do want you to support the creators you benefit from but if you just wanna see one single article and move on with your day then this might be helpful 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.

Platform availability

Available on 1 of 6 install platforms

  • Unraid
  • TrueNAS (not listed)
  • Umbrel (not listed)
  • ZimaOS (not listed)
  • Proxmox (not listed)
  • Helm (not listed)

Also on Docker Hub and GitHub

Health score

65/100 Good

Maintained
82last commit 18 days ago
Popular
734,301 GitHub stars
Easy to install
201 install platform, Docker image
Light to run
No data

Based on 3 of 4 factors.

How is this calculated?

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). Factors without data are left out and the rest are rescaled.

Availability: platform listings confirmed today

GitHub stars
4,301
Open issues
4
Last commit
2026-09-17
Latest release
v0.5.0
License
MIT
Activity
declining

Checked 7 days ago - source: GitHub (wasi-master/13ft)

Resources & Compatibility

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

Checked 7 days ago - source: Docker Hub image tags and published docs

First-install notes

No first-install notes yet.

Alternatives (7)

  • Anti-Paywall - This extension will mangle your browser's requests to maximize the chances of bypassing paywalls.
  • Ladder - Ladder is a web proxy to help bypass 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 4 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 6 days ago - public community threads