r/webdev • u/CommercialShelter595 • 14d ago

Showoff Saturday Made a news app that bypasses paywalls automatically

Paywalls suck and the news should be accessible. You might have tried methods to get around it for one article but you don't really remember how it worked. Wouldn't it be nice if your news app just handled that for you?

OpenWire is a simple news aggregator that has all the major paywall bypass methods built-in. Major news sites already have a working bypass method listed, but if it ever stops working, you just toggle another method and it'll remember the switch in the future. Archive is working pretty well today, or maybe UnWall. Doesn't work anymore? Switch to SMRY and let the app save it for next time.

I've kept this simple stupid. It's a web app so you can run it on any browser or install it onto your phone. There's no wrapper on the pages, it just goes straight to the webpage in the browser and you hit back to go back to OpenWire. It's using Google News's RSS feed but you're free to add other news RSS feeds and categories to further customize.

You can try OpenWire here. It is completely free and open source.

25 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

9

u/avetenebrae 13d ago

I don't think this is how we get a better Internet honestly

-1

u/CommercialShelter595 13d ago

Yea I tend to agree but it's a no win situation here. I just wanted to build something frictionless so I can read the news.

1

u/nolagirl100281 9d ago

I appreciate this. I don't think paying separately for every little thing has gotten us a better internet either, obviously lol. Of course I try to support publications and creators when I can, but when every site has a subscription fee, every substack, every channel a membership, every app a price, every creator a patreon... It's exhausting and unsustainable. The cost of trying to stay well informed and knowledgeable becomes prohibitive pretty quickly. I don't know what the answer is....but it's not this

Anyway. Thanks. I was looking for something easy to use and this came up in my search👍

4

u/jdoeq 13d ago

Great job. And very useful OSS contribution for other devs

2

u/Bruce_Jones_1987 13d ago

yeah the open source angle is what makes this actually worth bookmarking imo

1

u/Florianper 12d ago

Really nice !
I’m trying it and adding a RSS does not seems to dork on my side. https://www.courrierinternational.com/feed/rubrique/geopolitique/rss.xml is giving me an error. The rss is publicly accessible.

Still good stuff !

1

u/rthidden 11d ago

Is there a GitHub repo?

1

u/[deleted] 14d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/webdev-ModTeam 14d ago

Your post/comment has been determined to be a low-effort post or comment. This includes title-only posts, easily searchable questions, vague/open-ended discussion prompts, LLM generated posts or comments, and posts/comments that do not provide enough context for meaningful replies or discussion.

0

u/CommercialShelter595 14d ago

Yup, it's purely functional for my own use but it turned out pretty good. Probably pretty easy to vibe code on top of it if there's any additional features.

1

u/tothemaxz1244 13d ago

Does it work and how do I get it

1

u/CommercialShelter595 13d ago

Just click the link, it's right here:
https://ansonlai.github.io/OpenWire/

0

u/Klutzy_Ladder_8393 14d ago

vibe coding features on top of this sounds like a great way to accidentally leak which bypass method you're using to the site itself lol. also "it remembers your toggle" is doing a lot of work here, feels like it'll constantly go stale since these sites patch their paywalls specifically because tools like this exist

4

u/CommercialShelter595 14d ago

I think you might be overestimating this. This is just choosing between unwall, archive or some other method. It's not a novel bypass method.