remove-paywall-mcp

MCP server that removes article paywalls by searching internet archives. Give it a URL, get back the article text.

How it works

1. You give it a paywalled article URL

2. It searches internet archives (Wayback Machine, archive.is, Google Cache) for an archived copy — archives don't have paywalls because they were crawled without login gates

3. It extracts the article body with readability-lxml, stripping navigation, ads, and sidebar cruft

4. It returns clean text with the title and snapshot URL

It also learns from every attempt — success rates per domain per archive source are tracked in a local SQLite database, and archive search order is re-ranked automatically.

Related MCP server: mcp-server-wayback

Install

# zero-install (recommended — works everywhere uvx is available)
uvx remove-paywall-mcp

# from PyPI
pip install remove-paywall-mcp

# from source
pip install git+https://github.com/jasval/remove-paywall-mcp.git

# Docker
docker run -i --rm remove-paywall-mcp
docker compose up -d  # HTTP mode on port 8000

Platform configs

Once installed, add this to your MCP client config:

OpenCode

{
  "mcp": {
    "remove-paywall": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["uvx", "remove-paywall-mcp"],
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "remove-paywall": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["remove-paywall-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

LiteLLM

mcp_tools:
  remove_paywall:
    type: "stdio"
    command: "uvx"
    args: ["remove-paywall-mcp"]

Docker (any client)

{"command": "docker", "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "remove-paywall-mcp"]}

Tools

remove_paywall

Main tool. Removes a paywall from an article URL and returns clean article text.

search_archives

Search all archive sources for snapshots without extracting content. Useful to see what's available.

get_from_archive

Fetch from a specific archive source.

domain_info

Look up a domain in the knowledge base — paywall status, notes, and per-archive success rates.

add_domain

Register a domain in the knowledge base. Mark paywalled domains so archives are searched first, or non-paywalled domains so the live page is fetched directly.

Domain knowledge base

Seeded with 30 well-known paywalled domains (NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Medium, etc.), stored in SQLite at ~/.remove-paywall-mcp/domains.db. Tracks every archive success/failure per domain and re-ranks archive search order automatically — domains where archive.is consistently fails won't waste time on it.

Env vars

Archive sources

Priority is dynamically re-ranked per domain based on historical success rates recorded in the knowledge base.

Architecture

MCP client (Claude/OpenCode/LiteLLM)
       │  stdio or HTTP
       ▼
┌─────────────────┐
│    server.py     │  MCPServer with 5 tools
│  (.tool decorator)│
└────────┬────────┘
         │
    ┌────┴────┐
    ▼         ▼
┌────────┐ ┌──────────┐
│archives│ │ extractors│
│  .py   │ │   .py     │
│        │ │           │
│ wayback│ │readability│
│ archive│ │Beautiful  │
│ .is    │ │Soup       │
│memento │ │           │
└───┬────┘ └──────────┘
    │
    ▼
┌──────────────┐
│domain_store  │
│   .py        │
│              │
│ SQLite knows │
│ which domains│
│ have paywalls│
│ and which    │
│ archives work│
│ best (Laplace│
│ smoothed)    │
└──────────────┘

License

MIT