You used Pocket, Pocket is gone, and you are here looking for somewhere else to put the articles you keep meaning to read. Before anything else, the bad news: if you did not export your library before the middle of November 2025, it is not coming back.
getpocket.com/export redirects to a farewell page now. There is no archive and no grace period.
What makes this worse is that almost every guide you will find today still tells you to go there. Instapaper’s own Pocket pagesays to export your articles at that URL. Raindrop’s import helpsays the same. Wallabag’s docs still describe an OAuth method that has been permanently broken for months. Karakeep’s docs tell you Pocket “after a couple of minutes will mail you a zip file.” Feedly’s only instructions are from October 2020 and still present Pocket as a live service. Only Readwise’s documentation says out loud what happened: “As of November 12, 2025, the API has been disabled and users can no longer export their data.”
So this is not a migration guide. There is nothing left to migrate. It is a guide to picking the next one so you are not back here in three years.
What actually happened
Mozilla announced it on 22 May 2025 in a post titled Investing in what moves the internet forward. Pocket would shut on 8 July, downloads and new Premium purchases stopped immediately, and annual subscribers were refunded automatically. The stated reason, word for word: “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”
That post gives the export deadline as 8 October 2025. Be careful with any guide that repeats it, because it was the original date and it moved twice. Mozilla’s support page — quoted in press coverage in October and again in November 2025, and corroborated by Readwise’s docs — extended it first to 6 November and then to 12 November, when export closed and deletion began. We could not read that support page ourselves; it sits behind a CAPTCHA. What is not in dispute is that the export page no longer works.
Everything else went with it. Look the iPhone app up today and Apple returns nothing; the Android listing 404s. Firefox 140, released 24 June 2025, stripped out the Save to Pocket button and the New Tab integrations “per the service shutdown announcement.” Fakespot, Mozilla’s other side project, was killed in the same post.
One part did survive: the recommendation feed. It still runs on the Firefox New Tab, de-branded as “Recommended stories,” and Mozilla’s framing was that Pocket “helped shape the curated content recommendations you already see in Firefox, and that experience will keep getting better.” The advertising-adjacent half stayed; the product people used did not. Pocket was not small, either — Mozilla’s 2017 acquisition release put it at 10 million monthly active users and more than 3 billion saved items. (Pocket Casts is a different product from a different company and is unaffected, which people conflate constantly.)
Why do these keep dying?
The obvious theory is that free things die and paid things survive. It sounds right and it is wrong.
Pocket sold a subscription from 2014 and died anyway. Readability was subscription-only, routing most of its revenue to publishers, and shut down after 30 September 2016. Omnivore was free and fully open source, which is supposed to be the safe combination, and its hosted service went too.
What actually predicts survival is duller: whether the app is somebody’s entire business or a side asset inside a bigger one.
Pocket was a side asset in a browser company, killed in the same post as another side asset. Omnivore’s team joined ElevenLabs in October 2024 — the people were hired, the product was discontinued. The code stayed public, but the repo now describes Omnivore as “a completely Self-Hosted application” and there is no hosted option at all. Delicious passed through Yahoo, then AVOS, then Science Inc., before a competitor bought it and switched it to read-only in June 2017.
Now the other column. Pinboard is paid-only, run by one person, and has been going 17 years; its own tour credits “a sane business model and a simple pricing plan that keeps it in business while competitors come and go.” Raindrop.io is 13 years old under a single sole proprietor. Readwise is bootstrapped on purpose. Instapaper has been independent since a management buyout in 2018.
Instapaper is the clean experiment here, because the only thing that ever changed about it was who owned it. Its developer API, Instaparser, was killed by Pinterest in 2016 — “Starting today, we will cease signups for Instaparser and halt billing for existing customers.” On 31 March 2026 the now-independent Instapaper relaunched it. Same product, same business model, same customers. Different owner.
Instapaper demolishes the price theory on its own, too. Under Pinterest, Premium was made free for everyone in November 2016. On independence it went back to paid at $2.99 a month in 2018, explicitly “to build a long-term sustainable product and business, without venture capital,” then rose to $6 in January 2024. Free, then paid, then pricier — and healthier at every step.
So the question to ask about any app on this page is not what it costs. It is who owns it, and whether this is the only thing they do.
So what should you actually use?
Start with Instapaper. It is the closest thing to the Pocket you remember, the free tier is real — unlimited saves, sync, folders, and 500 articles cached on the device for offline reading — and it is the most actively developed product in the category, with version 10 shipping on 28 July 2026 alongside the first website redesign since 2008. It passes the ownership test outright, and it inherited Pocket’s slot as Kobo’s built-in read-later integration.
Three flaws worth knowing before you commit. The current release requires iOS 26.0 or later, so an older iPhone stays on an older build. The free web version carries ads. And its export is the weakest of anything here: an emailed account CSV plus a reading-list PDF or ePub, and the docs state that each download bundle “includes the first 19 articles in the list.” Whether that CSV contains your full article text is not something Instapaper states either way. In a piece whose entire premise is that apps die, that is the flaw that should bother you most.
If you read seriously and will pay, Readwise Reader is better. Text-to-speech, the best highlighting in the category, spaced repetition over what you saved, RSS, PDFs and EPUBs, YouTube and podcast transcripts, native desktop apps, no ads — and an export that actually includes the full content of the articles you saved. There is no free tier at all, though: a 30-day trial with no card, then $9.99 a month billed annually or $12.99 billed monthly. One trap on the pricing page is worth flagging, because it catches people — the cheaper $5.59 Lite plan does not include Reader. Its Chrome extension is also listed as “Readwise Highlighter” rather than Reader, a genuine search trap.
Past that, it depends what you actually want:
- You want free. Matter if you are all-Apple — a basic tier described as free forever, with HD text-to-speech and gesture highlighting, but iPhone, iPad and web only and no Android app at all. Instapaper if you need Android too.
- You want it to still exist in 2031. Instapaper, or wallabag hosted at 11 EUR a year by the project’s own founder if you would rather trust an open-source project than a company.
- You highlight everything. Readwise Reader, or Readeck if you can self-host.
- You care about privacy. GoodLinks — $9.99 once, no account at all, syncing over your own iCloud.
- You own a Kobo or a Kindle. Instapaper, built into Kobo and able to send to Kindle, or Readeck for OPDS.
- You need offline reading. Anything on this page except Raindrop and Karakeep.
Two to steer clear of, plus one pattern. Folio pitches itself directly at Pocket refugees — “Pocket is shutting down — but the spirit of it lives on in Folio” — and has not shipped an iOS update since September 2025, not touched its Chrome extension since August 2025, not published anything since July 2025, and has 12 iOS ratings. An app that markets itself as the answer to a shutdown and then goes quiet for eleven months is not where you send someone who just got burned. Then there is omnivore.app, which is a live zombie: roughly 20 months after the service was deprecated, the site still loads, still serves the original marketing page, and still shows a working-looking “Sign Up for Free” button.
And the pattern: nearly every listicle ranking Pocket alternatives turns out to be published by a tiny competing app, which ranks itself first. iLinkVault’s own blog calls iLinkVault “the best overall Pocket alternative in 2026.” It has four iOS ratings, one developer, and launched in July 2025.
Do this today, not later
Whichever one you pick, export it this week, while nothing is wrong. That is the whole lesson of Pocket: the window to get your data out closes on a date you do not choose, and the instructions everyone links to keep working long after the thing they describe has stopped.
If export matters to you more than anything else, Readeck is the best in the category by a distance — EPUB per article or collection, an OPDS catalogue, CSV, bookmarks HTML, and a full-profile ZIP that re-imports into any other instance. It needs self-hosting, which is a real ask, but nothing else here offers that guarantee. The surprise runner-up is Raindrop: HTML, CSV, TXT and a ZIP of your uploads, all on the free plan, with only automatic daily backups held back for Pro. Just be clear about what you are choosing. Raindrop’s own help doc answers the offline question with “No. An internet connection is required to sync changes and save new bookmarks.” It files links beautifully. It is not a reader.
Then set a reminder for six months from now and export again.
The read-later apps, ranked
| Tool | Best for | Pricing | RatingApp Store |
|---|---|---|---|
1 Instapaper | Best overall | Freemium | 4.6(3.5K) |
2 Readwise Reader | Best for serious readers | Paid | 4.6(567) |
3 Matter | Best free (Apple only) | Freemium | 4.6(1.2K) |
4 GoodLinks | Best one-time purchase | Paid | 4.7(630) |
5 Readeck | Best self-hosted | Open Source | 4.6(9) |
6 wallabag | Best hosted open source | Open Source | 3.3(37) |
7 Raindrop.io | Best bookmark manager | Freemium | 4.5(405) |
8 Karakeep | Best for archiving | Open Source | 4.6(42) |
App Store ratings checked July 30, 2026