12ft

Defunct website for bypassing paywalls February 2026 Thomas Millar 12ft logo.svg No 12ft No JavaScript proxy browser No 12 ft.io was a website that allowed users to selectively browse any site with JavaScript disabled. It also allowed some online paywalls to be bypassed.12ft – Hop any paywall https://12ft.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210131075119/https://12ft.io/ 2021-01-31 2025-10-08 12ft.io It was owned by its creator Thomas Millar.Martin Alexander Paywall-breaking tool 12ft asks users to subscribe to cover costs https://news.sky.com/story/paywall-breaking-tool-12ft-asks-users-to-subscribe-to-cover-costs-12536304 2022-04-08 Sky News en 2025-07-20 https://web.archive.org/web/20250720085139/https://news.sky.com/story/paywall-breaking-tool-12ft-asks-users-to-subscribe-to-cover-costs-12536304 live In November 2023, its hosting platform Vercel took the website offline. It was back online the following month. On 2025-07-17 MDY, the News Media Alliance reported that it had taken down the website. Blocking Some websites had blocked 12 ft, such as Bloomberg and The New York Times.12ft has been disabled for this site https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com dead https://web.archive.org/web/20231026234705/https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com 2023-10-26 2023-06-01 12ft.io Function The website's name is based on the phrase "show me a 10 foot wall and I'll show you a 12 foot ladder."crumbling homepage It bypassed paywalls by pretending to be a search engine crawler when requesting a webpage.Guaglione Sara Publishers still find it challenging to measure readers bypassing their paywalls https://digiday.com/media/publishers-still-find-it-challenging-to-measure-readers-bypassing-their-paywalls/ Digiday 25 August 2023 Outage history On August 31, 2022, the site was offline, with Vercel displaying a "DEPLOYMENT DISABLED" message and returning an HTTP 451 status code.https://12ft.io/ 451: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED 12ft.io 1 September 2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20220831063530/https://12ft.io/ 31 August 2022 dead This Deployment has been disabled. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly. The site came back online on September 1, but was disabled again on September 10. The site was available again as of September 11, but was no longer showing cached versions of pages for NYTimes.com, instead displaying a message of "12ft has been disabled for this site". On July 30, 2023, the site's security certificate appeared to be invalid. The certificate in question was issued by Cisco Umbrella Secondary SubCA lax-SG with an expiration date of August 3. On November 2, 2023, the site only displayed an error 402 with a message "402: Payment Required. This Deployment has been disabled. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly." Thomas Millar announced on X that provider Vercel had removed his account access,12ft is down, @vercel banned me https://twitter.com/thmsmlr/status/1718663563353755982 2023-10-30 X 12ft is down, @vercel banned me / No warning on a Friday night, while I was on vacation. / Worst yet, they took down all my projects and confiscated all my domains. / No response from support. and Vercel's CEO quickly replied that this was because they had broken their Terms of Service.Vercel CEO reply https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1718680650067460138 2025-08-11 X Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses. / Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you. It was back online the following month.Shah Saqib 2023-12-04 What is 12ft Ladder?: popular paywall-bypassing site back online https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/12ft-ladder-closes-paywall-bypass-alternatives-b1118009.html 2023-12-06 Evening Standard en On 2025-07-17 MDY, the News Media Alliance reported that it had taken down the website.Roth Emma 2025-07-17 News publishers take paywall-blocker 12ft.io offline https://www.theverge.com/news/709209/news-media-alliance-12ft-io-takedown-paywall 2025-07-17 The Verge en-US subscription 2025-09-03 https://web.archive.org/web/20250903065101/https://www.theverge.com/news/709209/news-media-alliance-12ft-io-takedown-paywall 2025-07-17 News Publishers Take Paywall-Blocker 12ft.io Offline Slashdot https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/07/17/2029207/news-publishers-take-paywall-blocker-12ftio-offline 2025-09-09crumbling Data from UpDownToday show that 12 ft.io was last recorded as available on March 27, 2024, and last recorded as down on December 11, 2025; as of March 4, 2026, the domain was listed as returning a 404 status code.12ft.io — outages, problems and current status https://updowntoday.com/en/sites/12ft.io UpDownToday 2026-02-11 See also Bypass Paywalls Clean Open Access Button Unpaywall References Commentary: The Crumbling Bypass: Alliance Brings Down Paywall Avoidance Site Ray Schultz July 17, 2025 Publishing Insider MediaPost https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/407492/the-crumbling-bypass-alliance-brings-down-paywall.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250805203431/https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/407492/the-crumbling-bypass-alliance-brings-down-paywall.html August 5, 2025 External links Category:Open access projects Category:Defunct websites Category:Internet properties disestablished in 2025 Category:Products and services discontinued in 2025