Mozilla shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025, and closed data export permanently on November 12, 2025. A year later the category has sorted itself out — some tools absorbed the refugees, one more app died, and a clear pattern emerged about which survive.
I'm Fisher. I build Burn 451, which makes read-later apps literally my job: everything below has been run against my own daily reading on iPhone and Mac, most for months, with prices re-verified from official pricing pages in July 2026. Yes, my app is on the list; its cons are real, and I'll tell you when to pick something else.
This is the condensed version — the full guide has the complete testing notes, FAQ, and migration playbook.
The short answer, by scenario
- Your Pocket problem was a graveyard of unread saves → Burn 451 (free tier, 24-hour timer)
- You highlight heavily and want a knowledge pipeline → Readwise Reader ($9.99/mo)
- You want a beautiful free archive → Raindrop
- Zero subscriptions, Apple-only → GoodLinks ($9.99 once)
- You self-host → Karakeep (all-in-one) or Wallabag (reading-focused)
The table
| App | Free tier | Paid | AI | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burn 451 | 5 saves/day | $4.99/mo | Summaries + MCP (Pro) | Clearing the backlog habit |
| Readwise Reader | 30-day trial only | $9.99/mo annual | Ghostreader | Highlight-driven readers |
| Instapaper | Yes, light limits | $5.99/mo | None | Minimalists |
| Raindrop.io | Unlimited saves | ≈$28–38/yr | AI search (Pro) | Visual archives |
| Matter | Core reading free | ≈$60/yr | Digest, Co-Reader | iPhone typography lovers |
| Wallabag | Self-host free | €11/yr hosted | None | Open-source purists |
| GoodLinks | — | $9.99 once | None | iOS, no subscriptions |
| Karakeep | Self-host free | — | Tags via your key | Self-hosted everything |
| Pinboard | — | Low yearly fee | None | Decade-scale archives |
| Safari Reading List | Free | — | None | Apple-only light use |
Quick verdicts
1. Burn 451 — Every save gets 24 hours: read it and it moves to Sparks, keep it and it goes to your permanent vault, ignore it and it burns. The free tier covers the timer, the vault, the Chrome extension, and an MCP server that lets Claude or Cursor search your saved articles; Pro ($4.99/mo) adds AI summaries and unlimited saves. No Android, web articles only, and deliberately no bulk import — if you want to keep 3,000 unread saves, this is the wrong tool and I'd rather say so here.
2. Readwise Reader — The power-user pick: RSS, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube transcripts, and the most mature highlight pipeline into Obsidian or Notion. Its spaced-repetition Daily Review is the one feature here I genuinely admire. No permanent free tier, and the feature density overwhelms casual readers.
3. Instapaper — The 2008 original; the reading view is still one of the calmest places on the internet, and there is deliberately no AI over your content. Full-text search is paywalled, and the open archive quietly becomes a pile.
4. Raindrop.io — The best free product in the category as a place to keep links: unlimited saves, gorgeous visual collections. As a place to finish articles, it produces the classic outcome — a beautiful, ever-growing museum of things you meant to read.
5. Matter — The prettiest reader on iOS, with genuinely lovely typography and audio. iPhone-first with a thin web client, and development pace has visibly slowed — worth weighing before building a long-term workflow on it.
6. Wallabag — The stable workhorse of open-source read-later: parses well, works offline, imports Pocket's export format, and the hosted plan is the cheapest here at €11/year. Dated UI, no AI, self-hosting is on you.
7. GoodLinks — The anti-subscription answer: native across iPhone/iPad/Mac, offline, iCloud sync, $9.99 once. Apple-only, no web access, no automation.
8. Karakeep — The community successor to the hole Omnivore left: bookmarks, read-later, and notes in one self-hosted box, with AI auto-tagging via your own OpenAI or Ollama key. The most capable free option — if you're comfortable being your own ops team.
9. Pinboard — Not a reading app; a famously spartan bookmark archive run by one person since 2009. People pick it because it will still be there in ten years.
10. Safari Reading List — Free, built in, honestly fine for five articles a week. Its failure mode is invisibility: the list silently absorbs everything you'll never look at again.
The graveyard, and what it teaches
Two names are missing because they're dead. Pocket — the category king — shut down July 8, 2025. Omnivore — everyone's "free Readwise" answer — closed its hosted service on November 15, 2024 after an ElevenLabs acqui-hire. The pattern in both obituaries: passive save-and-forget produced enormous piles and no habit worth paying for. It's the category's structural disease — and it's why the two growing survivors both add pressure (Readwise's review loop, Burn's timer) instead of more storage.
Migrating from Pocket in 2026
If you exported before the November 2025 cutoff: Raindrop, Karakeep, Linkwarden, and Wallabag import the Pocket HTML file directly; Instapaper has its own import tool. Burn deliberately doesn't bulk-import — re-save the handful you'd actually read this week and let the rest go. If you missed the export window, the archive is unrecoverable; start fresh and treat it as a filter.
The original version of this guide has the full testing methodology, six-question FAQ, and per-app deep-dive links. It's updated as prices change.
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