On May 22, 2025, Mozilla announced that Pocket would shut down on July 8, 2025, with data export available until October 8, 2025.
Like many readers, I had years (and thousands) of articles in Pocket. When the shutdown notice hit, I went looking for a replacement and discovered what I actually needed from a read-it-later system.
My must-haves
- Permanent copy, offline: not just cached, but a file I own that survives if the web page changes or disappears.
- Free: at least for the core workflow; I was not looking to pay a subscription this time.
- Mobile-first: most of my saving and reading starts on my phone.
- Easy highlighting and a clean reading experience.
- Organization: simple folders or tags for organization and to find things later.
- (Nice to have) Voice: hear articles read aloud.
The search (a lot of apps, a lot of dead ends)
I tried a long list of apps in the stores and brainstormed with LLMs about edge cases and workflows. Many tools were great readers but failed my permanent copy test on the free tier. Some felt risky due to slow development, and others were more complex than I wanted.
The solution I landed on
I stopped chasing another service and went native:
Save to PDF -> Store in a cloud folder -> Highlight in a standard reader.
- Permanent: each saved article becomes a PDF I own.
- Portable: I keep them in one cloud folder (I use pCloud) with subfolders by topic or by year and month.
- Readable and highlightable: opening the PDF in Apple Books makes highlighting easy; annotations are saved in the file.
- Voice: on iPhone, Speak Screen can read any open PDF aloud; I can also open in Books and use Speak Screen there.
How I save on phone (two taps)
- Share menu in the browser -> Print -> pinch out the preview -> Save to Files -> my Read It Later folder.
- If I want to highlight immediately, Open in Books.
How I save on laptop
- Print -> Save as PDF to the same cloud folder.
- For a pixel-perfect offline copy, I may also save an HTML snapshot with the SingleFile browser extension, but the PDF is my forever copy.
Moving years of Pocket links
I exported my Pocket data as a CSV and asked an LLM to help automate turning thousands of saved links into permanent PDFs. It produced a small local tool that runs on my computer: a Node.js script that opens each URL in headless Chrome (Puppeteer), extracts a clean article view with Mozilla Readability, sanitizes the HTML, and prints a tidy PDF directly into my cloud folder. No servers and no third-party accounts.
What the LLM built
- Tech stack: Node.js, Puppeteer (headless Chrome), @mozilla/readability for clean article content, sanitize-html for safety, plus csv-parse, slugify, and yargs.
- CSV aware: points at the Pocket CSV, detects the URL column, and can skip archived rows (I skipped anything marked “archive” in column E).
- PDF only: a switch to write PDFs only so the folder stays clean.
- Wayback fallback: if a page is gone or shows a “Just a moment…” interstitial, it pulls the closest Internet Archive snapshot and saves that instead.
- Filename template: I set filenames to the article title only.
- Resume friendly: start and limit options let me continue where I left off or process in batches if my laptop sleeps.
- Reporting: a JSON report lists successes and any failures, plus a tiny triage script to print URLs to retry.
The result: a neat archive of permanent, highlightable PDFs in my cloud drive. For dead links, the Wayback fallback rescued many of them. Manual saving is fine for small libraries, but automation made a large migration realistic.
What I learned (and wish I had known sooner)
- Offline is not the same as permanent. Many apps cache articles, but if the source page changes or disappears, your copy can break. A file you control (PDF or HTML) is the safest bet.
- Own your library. Standard formats, plain folders, and a cloud drive you already use beat lock-in.
- Highlighting matters. PDFs in Books are easy to mark up and the annotations stay with the file across devices.
- Voice is built in. System text-to-speech like Speak Screen on iOS can read PDFs without a subscription.
- Services come and go. Pocket’s shutdown reminded me to choose workflows that survive app closures.
My current setup (feel free to copy it)
- Capture: Print to PDF from phone and laptop into /Read It Later on my cloud drive.
- Organize: subfolders like Research, Ideas, and How-To, or year and month (for example, 2025/08). Filenames are the article title.
- Read and mark up: open in Apple Books for highlights and notes.
- Listen: use Speak Screen to read any open PDF aloud.
- Search: system search finds titles and often PDF text; the folder structure covers the rest.
Why this works for me
It is simple, durable, and free. I do not worry about an app’s future, and I do not lose articles when the web changes. I can still use read-it-later apps as inboxes if I want, but the keepers live in my own archive.