In May 2025, Mozilla announced that it was shutting down the popular read-it-later app Pocket, which it had acquired back in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. That led to a growing demand for alternative apps that could help people save online content, particularly longer articles, that they want to read later when they have more time.
While Mozilla exited the business, saying the way people are browsing the web is changing, the shutdown boosted adoption of a number of other apps, like Matter, Instapaper, and Raindrop.io, among others. It’s supporting the creation of new, indie alternatives, as well.
Many of the apps will support imports. However, Pocket users only had until October 8, 2025, to export their saved articles and other items, including lists, archives, favorites, notes, and highlights.
Below are the read-it-later alternatives that are picking up where Pocket left off.
Matter is a GV-backed company that makes an eponymous iOS app along with browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The app lets you listen to articles and transcribes your favorite podcasts.
Though the app itself is free to use, you can pay $79.99 per year to unlock features like improved transcriptions for podcasts and YouTube videos, tools to adjust reading speed, and additional integrations with other apps like notes apps, Gmail, and Kindle.
In March 2025, the company also added an AI-powered co-reader to answer questions about different topics users might have while reading an article.
Instapaper, which was founded by developer Marco Arment in 2008, is one of the oldest read-it-later apps. It’s available on both iOS and Android, and lets you save unlimited articles and videos without paying any fees. It was acquired by Pinterest in 2016.
However, for $59.99 per year, you can add notes to saved articles, have a permanent archive of articles in your accounts, create a text-to-speech playlist to listen to stories, enable full text search for all saved items, and get the ability to send articles to your Kindle.
The company allowed Pocket users to import their account into Instapaper. Users who imported this way also received an email offering a three-month free trial to Instapaper Premium.
Raindrop works primarily as an alternative bookmark manager for web browsers. However, its accompanying mobile apps for iOS and Android allow you to read your saved articles and PDFs. The free version gives you unlimited bookmark saving along with integrations like Zapier and IFTTT.
If you decide to pay $33 per year, you’ll also get AI-powered suggestions for organizing your content better, full text search, reminders for your bookmarks, a duplicate and broken links finder, and a file upload limit of 10GB per month.
Former Twitter engineer Joe Fabisevich created Plinky to allow users to save and categorize any kind of link, including articles, videos, recipes, and memes.
The app is available across all Apple platforms, along with browser extensions to save links. Once you’re signed up, Plinky lets you use folders and tags to categorize your links, and even set reminders to read them at a specific time.
You can save 50 links, create three folders, and use five tags with the free version. To remove these restrictions, you can pay $3.99 per month, $39.99 a year, or a one-time fee of $159.99. Pro users are able to save unlimited links, create an unlimited number of folders, use an unlimited number of tags, and set an unlimited number of reminders.
Paperspan is a very simple app that offers a reading list across devices, allows you to add notes, and has text-to-speech functionality.
The app is free, but it offers an $8.99 per month subscription to unlock advanced search, as well as the ability to create playlists, show reading stats, and send your articles to Kindle.
(Though the app works, PaperSpan hasn’t been updated for some time, which may not be a good signal about its long-term future. The app is available on both iOS and Android.)
Readwise, a tool to add notes and highlights to articles, launched its Reader app in 2021. The app allows you to import RSS feeds, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, and more to read at your convenience. Because of its integration with Readwise, the Reader app offers great annotation features. It also features offline text search and an AI assistant.
Plus, you can integrate Reader with knowledge management apps such as Obsidian, Notion, Roam Research, Evernote, and Logseq. The app is free to try for 30 days, and then you have to pay a $9.99 per month Readwise subscription to access it.
Readwise had allowed Pocket users to import their entire Pocket archive into Reader, adding that its app supports a number of features — like PDFs, ePubs, X posts, AI, and filtering — that Pocket never did.
DoubleMemory is a newer indie app focused on the Apple ecosystem, offering native apps for both Mac and iOS.
On Mac, you can easily save any link or content by pressing Cmd + C twice. The saved content will then appear in a Pinterest-style tile format.
The app also allows you to read offline and search through text, notes, and tags. You don’t need an account to start using DoubleMemory. And if you have multiple apps, it uses your iCloud account to sync content across them.
DoubleMemory is free with in-app purchases. It offers a $3.99 monthly subscription or an annual subscription of $17.99.
Recall works as a browser extension and offers a mobile app that allows users to save content from the web, including articles, PDFs, blog posts, podcasts, Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, and recipes.
However, unlike traditional read-it-later apps, Recall uses AI to automatically summarize content, categorize it, and then resurface it when it’s related to something new you’re looking to learn about.
Designed to enhance your ability to remember information, you can review your summaries from your personal knowledge base on a saved spaced repetition schedule.
