Read-It-Later Apps After Pocket: What to Use, and Whether You Need One at All

Pocket was the default. It came bundled in Firefox, it was free, and for a decade "save it for later" meant the same thing to most people. Mozilla announced its closure in May 2025, switched it off on 8 July, and closed the export window on 8 October. If you had a reading habit built on it, you have spent the last year improvising.

We had a few thousand items in Pocket between us. Here is what we moved to, what we tried and dropped, and the question we should have asked first.

Do you need an app at all?

Before comparing apps, count how much you actually saved. For a lot of people the honest answer is a handful of links a week, most of them read within a day or two. That workload does not need a product. Safari, Chrome and Edge each have a reading list built in, synced through the account you are already signed into, with offline copies on mobile.

What the built-in lists lack is everything after saving: tags, search, highlights, an archive you can trust to still be there in five years. If you never used those in Pocket, you will not miss them now. If your saved list was a research pile — sources for something you were writing, in the way we described in our piece on research tools — you need a real app, and the rest of this article is for you.

Instapaper: the closest thing to Pocket

Instapaper predates Pocket and has outlived it, and it is the least surprising replacement. The free tier saves unlimited articles and videos, syncs across web, iOS and Android, and lets you file things into folders. The reading view is plain in the best sense: text, a few fonts, no feed of recommended content.

The free tier caps you at five notes a month, and search and the permanent archive sit behind Premium at $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year. That second limit is the one that matters. On the free plan, older items can drop out of full-text search, so if you want to find the thing you saved in 2023 by a phrase you remember, you are paying. Premium also adds Kindle delivery, a PDF reader and text-to-speech playlists.

It imports Pocket's CSV export directly, archive and all. If you exported in time, this is a twenty-minute migration.

Readwise Reader: the most capable, and the most expensive way to get it

Reader is a different kind of product. It takes articles, RSS feeds, email newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs and YouTube transcripts into a single queue, and everything you highlight flows into Readwise's daily review and out to Obsidian, Notion, Logseq or Roam. If you have a notes system — we compared the main ones in note-taking apps for thinking — Reader is the piece that connects reading to it.

Reader is worth the money if you highlight and review. If you read and forget, you are paying for a loop you never close.

The cost is the catch. Reader is not sold on its own: it comes only with the full Readwise plan at $9.99 a month billed yearly, or $12.99 monthly, after a 30-day trial. The cheaper Lite plan does not include it. That is roughly double Instapaper Premium for a product that does a great deal more, and whether that more is worth it depends entirely on whether you use the highlight-to-notes half.

Raindrop: a bookmark manager that can also read

Raindrop is where a lot of Pocket refugees ended up, and it is a good product that is solving a slightly different problem. It is a bookmark manager first: collections, nested folders, tags, a visual grid, and it saves anything with a URL rather than just articles. The free tier has no limit on bookmarks, collections or devices.

Pro adds the reading features that make it a Pocket replacement — full-text search of the pages you saved, permanent copies so a dead link still opens, cloud backup and more upload space — and yearly billing is about a fifth cheaper than monthly. If you want to keep a library of links and occasionally read one in a clean view, start here. If you want a queue you clear, it is more structure than you need.

Wallabag: for people who have just been burnt

The lesson of Pocket, and of Omnivore before it, is that a reading archive on somebody else's server lasts as long as their business does. Wallabag is the answer to that worry: open source, self-hostable on anything that runs PHP and a database, with a hosted version at €11 a year after a 14-day trial if you want the ownership without the ops.

It is plainer than the others and the mobile apps are functional rather than lovely. It exports to EPUB and PDF, imports from Pocket and Instapaper, and it will not be acquired and shut down. For an archive you expect to keep for a decade, that is worth more than a nicer font.

Free tiers side by side

App	Free tier	First paid step	Imports Pocket
Browser reading list	Everything it does, synced with your account	None	No
Instapaper	Unlimited saves, folders, sync, 5 notes a month	$5.99 a month or $59.99 a year	Yes
Readwise Reader	30-day trial only	$9.99 a month billed yearly, $12.99 monthly	Yes
Raindrop.io	Unlimited bookmarks, collections and devices	Pro, yearly about 20% cheaper than monthly	Yes
Wallabag	Self-hosted, all features	€11 a year hosted	Yes

The habit matters more than the app

Every one of us had a Pocket archive with hundreds of unread items in it, and the shutdown was the first time we looked at them. Almost none were worth reading a year on. The app was never the problem; the missing habit was.

Two rules fixed it. Anything unread after thirty days is archived, no exceptions and no guilt, because if you did not want it in a month you did not want it. And every save gets a reason — one tag or one line about why — which makes the item findable later and cuts reflexive saving by more than half. Pick whichever app above suits you, then set those two rules on day one. The queue is only useful if it empties.