Simple Hack to access the premium content on Medium for free — Freadium

I find Medium as a great blogging platform, mostly because of its simple UI/UX design. Very neat blogs with optimised screen space, at least on desktops (can’t comment for mobile apps). Everyday I open Medium, I tend to read 3–4 articles on various topics. But there is a problem with Medium, as it only allows users (non-members) to read/access 5 premium articles per month. I had to find some way to access them without upgrading my account i.e I didn’t want to pay as I can’t afford it, simply said.

Upgrade form on a premium article

Idea

One fine day, I read around 5–6 articles on hot topics and eventually I maxed out my free article limit for that month [ it was the first day of the :( ]and I wanted to read more. I accidentally logged out from medium (don’t know how this happened :P), after some while I again opened the article via google search and boom, it opened without blocking me/asking me to upgrade. I realised that if I open the premium articles i.e those articles which required some charges, in incognito mode, I would be able to read it as a non-logged-in user. The idea was just to open the article in incognito mode (in chrome browser). Every time the article was blocked for me, I just copied the url and opened a new incognito window (you already know how to open an incognito window don’t you :P), and pasted the url.

But as a lazy guy I felt great efforts in

1. moving my cursor to url bar
2. copying the url
3. opening an incognito window and pasting the url there

While researching for similar such tools, I came across Readium and thought of eliminating the idea of opening the article in incognito altogether, easing the UX.

Enters — FREADIUM

I wanted to minimise my efforts. So I started developing a chrome extension — Freadium short form for Free + Read + Medium, which detects if the article is asking to upgrade my account and if it does ask then the extension just updates the page with the free content.

I know that the authors earn money from the premium content and I would advise people to take the membership plan to support the authors and also avail other features too.

There is a button for this chrome extension as a backup, which if clicked will open the window in incognito mode if content is not loaded automatically [This might happen as Medium engineers mostly change the way how the content will be fetched and displayed and some of the ways will not allow automated bots to read the content]. So you can use that too.

Chrome extension button in the toolbar

Want to try it out?

• Get the chrome extension from here.
• Unzip it and add it to your chrome extensions, this youtube video can help you in setting up, hardly takes a min.
• Let me know in comments how you feel about this simple hack or if you have any other idea.