Apps & Consumer
Pocket shuts down — here are the best alternatives
Mozilla's read-it-later app Pocket shut down after users had until October 8, 2025 to export their saved articles, driving adoption of alternatives like Matter, Instapaper, and Raindrop.io.
Mozilla announced in May 2025 that it was shutting down Pocket, the read-it-later app it had acquired in 2017 for an undisclosed amount, saying the way people browse the web is changing. Pocket users had until October 8, 2025 to export their saved articles, lists, archives, favorites, notes, and highlights before the shutdown, which boosted adoption of alternatives such as Matter, Instapaper, and Raindrop.io — and spurred a wave of new, indie replacements.
Matter, backed by GV, offers an iOS app and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that can read articles aloud and transcribe podcasts; the free app adds a $79.99-a-year premium tier with better transcriptions and integrations with apps like Gmail and Kindle. Instapaper, one of the oldest read-it-later apps, founded by developer Marco Arment in 2008 and now owned by Pinterest, lets users save unlimited articles for free, with a $59.99-a-year plan adding notes, permanent archives, and text-to-speech; it let Pocket users import their accounts and offered a three-month free trial of Instapaper Premium. Raindrop.io, primarily a bookmark manager, gives unlimited free saves plus Zapier and IFTTT integrations, or $33 a year for AI-powered organization and full-text search.
Other options lean further into AI or open standards. Readwise Reader, launched in 2021, supports RSS feeds, PDFs, and an AI assistant, and let Pocket users import their entire archive, for $9.99 a month after a 30-day trial. Wallabag and Readeck are open-source alternatives that support offline reading and data export in multiple formats, while the Obsidian Web Clipper and Karakeep both use AI-assisted tagging and integrate with note-taking workflows. TechCrunch notes the list isn’t exhaustive, and new tools keep emerging to fill the gap Pocket left behind.
Why it matters
Pocket’s shutdown scattered its user base across a fragmented field of read-it-later tools — a reminder that even long-running, widely used products can disappear, and that data portability determines how painful that disappearance is.