// TECHCRUNCH — MOBILE & WEB
Read-it-later app Pocket shut down — here are the best alternatives
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.