first thing I tried it failed on, probably because it is a news site and recent... thanks for the suggestion though

There is a selfhosted tool called 13ft which does exactly that. But in my experience, there are paywalls that it doesn't succeed to get around but 12ft.io could.

Archive.is works by saving snapshots of pages, unlike 12ft, which just stripped the paywall on the fly. With very new pages, a snaptshot might not be saved yet. In that case, go to the home page and use the box to ask to make a new snapshot now. It will take a minute and then you should see it.

first thing I tried it failed on, probably because it is a news site and recent... thanks for the suggestion though

I see 12ft.io is down and has been for a day or 2. Any alternatives that work as well (tried a few over the years). I have no interest in removing loads of paywalls just the odd thing or 2 now and again

Just found several posts and vids saying it is being shut down... I guessed it would happen eventually

yup - I understand that, not as simple though is it?

There is an extension that bypass all the paywalls that 12ft was able to and some more. It's banned in both chrome addon store and firefox addon store https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

Depends on the news site, in-demand US based articles get a full copy pretty quick. Somewhat more niche content can take time or it even never gets an archived copy.

Pasting a URL in a box and hitting enter is way too much effort to avoid paying for content.

This article says it did it by disguising itself as a web crawler. So can I just set my user agent to googlebot and paywalls will disappear?