Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005

The New York Times charges $17/month.
The Wall Street Journal charges $38/month.
Nature charges $199/year.

Someone just open sourced a proxy that bypasses all of them for $0. And publishers cannot shut it down.

It's called Ladder.

Here's the trick that makes it work:

Every news site and academic journal on earth shows Google the full article text for free. They have no choice. Block Googlebot and you disappear from search results overnight.

Ladder pretends to be Googlebot.

Same headers. Same fingerprint. Same access Google gets.

→ Paste any paywalled URL
→ Full article loads instantly
→ No account. No subscription. No credit card.
→ Works on NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Nature, Science, The Lancet, The Atlantic, and hundreds more
→ Also strips CORS headers from any URL, which saves developers a stupid amount of time

Publishers got 12ft killed by pressuring the domain registrar.

Ladder runs on your own server. There's no domain to seize. No company to pressure. No central server to shut down.

One Docker command. Your machine. Your rules.

6.3K stars. MIT License. 100% Opensource -

Apr 28, 2026 View on X →

https://x.com/ihtesham2005/status/2049133587027660879