How to Bypass the Medium Paywall

Medium locks many of its best articles behind a membership paywall. Stories with the yellow star symbol require a paid membership after you exhaust your monthly free reads. Several methods reliably unlock these articles without subscribing.

Use a Paywall Removal Tool

Web archive tools are highly effective for Medium because Medium articles are frequently crawled and saved. The article text loads publicly before the paywall overlay activates, making archive versions easy to find and read.

Find the Friend Link

Medium's most effective bypass is the official friend link feature. Authors can generate a special URL that grants any reader free access to their locked article, regardless of membership. To find friend links, check the author's social media profiles — many authors share their articles with friend links on Twitter, LinkedIn, or in their newsletter.

If you know the author's name, searching for them on Twitter along with the article title often surfaces a friend link they shared when publishing the piece.

Open in Private Mode

Medium's metered paywall tracks reads using cookies. Private browsing clears cookies, resetting your free article count. This is one of the most reliable workarounds for Medium specifically because its paywall relies heavily on client-side tracking.

A single private window can let you read multiple articles. Close and reopen the private window if you exhaust the meter within a session.

Use Browser Reader Mode

Medium loads the full article content in the page source before the paywall overlay renders. Reader mode in Firefox or Safari extracts this text before the membership prompt appears, allowing you to read the complete article.

This is particularly effective on Medium because of how its articles are structured. The content exists in the HTML; the paywall is a JavaScript layer placed on top of it.

Disable JavaScript for the Page

Because Medium's paywall is entirely JavaScript-based, disabling JavaScript for medium.com removes the paywall overlay entirely while leaving the article text visible. In Chrome or Firefox, you can disable JavaScript for specific sites in the browser settings or through a browser extension.

The trade-off is that some Medium functionality breaks without JavaScript, but the article text itself remains readable.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Medium have a paywall?

Medium uses a metered paywall called the Medium Partner Program to compensate writers based on member reading time. Locked stories are marked with a star icon and require a Medium membership to read after the free monthly limit is reached.

How many free Medium articles can I read per month?

Medium allows a limited number of free member-only stories per month. The exact number has changed over time. Stories shared directly by the author using friend links are always free regardless of membership.

What is a Medium friend link?

A Medium friend link is a special URL that authors can generate to share their locked articles with anyone for free. If you find a friend link for an article, you can read it without a membership.

Is Medium worth subscribing to?

Medium membership costs a few dollars per month and gives unlimited access to all member stories while supporting writers directly. For heavy readers, the subscription is reasonably priced. Casual readers can often stay within the free monthly limit.