In recent years, numerous websites have added paywalls. If you want to read their articles, you have to sign up and pay a monthly subscription fee. Some sites have a “metered” paywall, meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money, and others have a hard paywall, where you have to pay to read even one article.

Paywalls are especially prevalent on news websites, largely because relying solely on ad revenue is no longer a viable strategy and news companies are pursuing more direct revenue streams like monthly subscriptions. Of course, paywalls aren’t entirely bad: it’s worth supporting journalism that you find valuable, so if you can afford to pay to read articles, you absolutely should. But whether you’ve forgotten your password, don’t have it saved on your phone, are in a hurry, or are simply strapped for cash and promised yourself you’ll subscribe later, there are several ways to bypass paywalls on the internet.

You may be able to use some of these methods successfully now, but that may change in the future as websites implement stricter circumvention methods. In any case, I hope you support the websites you do read, especially your friendly local news source. But if you can’t do that now, here are some of the best ways to bypass online paywalls.

The simplest ways are often the best. There are plenty of paywalled websites that have a policy that allows people who search via Google to access their articles for free. Your first step should be to copy the headline and paste it into the Google search bar. The article should appear as the first result, so just click on it to read it for free.