Host Wallabag without installing anything
The article you set aside waits for you as clean text, with no adverts and no cookie banner — and it will still be there when the site that published it has gone.
Starting at €4.99/month
Introduction
Wallabag installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. Save articles to read later and find them neatly laid out, with no advertising and no cookie banner. Browser extensions and mobile apps available. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Essentiel at €4.99/month incl. VAT — 2 GB of memory. Saving an article is not just a bookmark: Wallabag fetches the page, extracts the useful text using extraction rules written for each site, downloads the images if you ask it to, and works out a reading time. That work is what consumes, particularly during an import of several thousand articles where every page is fetched one after another. Add the full-text index and the building of EPUB files. The 2 GB cover all of that without a thought.
Many people arrive here because Pocket closed and years of reading had to go somewhere. Wallabag imports exactly those exports — Pocket, Instapaper, Readability — as well as Firefox and Chrome HTML bookmarks. You then save from the Firefox, Chrome and Edge extensions, from the Android and iOS apps, or with a bookmarklet dropped in the browser bar. And the way out is well made: an article or a whole tag exports as EPUB, MOBI or PDF, which turns the reading pile into a book for your e-reader.
What managed hosting changes
The text, and only the text
Wallabag keeps not the page but the article: title, author, date, body and images. Adverts, consent banners, subscription pop-ups and columns of suggestions stay outside. The estimated reading time is shown, which helps choose what to read on a station platform.
Annotate, highlight, tag
You highlight a passage, attach a note to it, and the annotation stays with the article. Tags are applied by hand or by automatic rules — every article from this domain gets this tag — which builds a watch list with no filing work.
Save from anywhere
Firefox, Chrome and Edge extensions, Android and iOS apps, a bookmarklet for browsers without an extension. The mobile apps download articles so you can read them on the underground, and sync when the network returns.
A reading pile that becomes a book
One article, a tag or a selection exports as EPUB, MOBI, PDF, plain text, CSV, JSON or XML. RSS feeds expose the unread, the starred and the archive: an e-reader or a feed reader can therefore fetch the pile by itself.
Why hand it over rather than install it
Ten years of Pocket to rescue
The service closed, the export is on your disk, and something has to read it back. Wallabag's importer is made for that format: articles come back with their tags, and the text is fetched for those whose site still exists.
An annotated watch list
A consultant keeps the articles of their sector, highlights the figures that matter, and six months later finds the source behind a summary note. Full-text search covers the content, not just the titles.
Weekend reading on an e-reader
You collect during the week, export the "to read" tag as EPUB on Friday, and the e-reader receives a properly assembled anthology. For many people that single use justifies the installation.
Keeping an article that is going to vanish
News sites reorganise, unpublish and close. The saved text stays readable at your place even when the original address returns an error, which makes a difference for documentary work.
Reading with no network
The mobile apps keep articles offline. In a tunnel, a plane or a dead zone, the pile is there, and articles read come back marked as read on reconnection.
Hosted in France
What you read says a great deal about you: your interests, your convictions, your trade. Your list stays in our own datacentre in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves.
Frequently asked questions
Wallabag has an importer dedicated to those formats: you upload the export file and it recreates your articles with their tags and their read or unread state. The import runs in the background, because every page is fetched to extract its text: on several thousand entries, expect a few hours. Pages whose site has disappeared arrive with their title and address but no body — that is unavoidable, and a good argument for not putting the import off.
Two routes. The export: you select a tag or a list and get an EPUB or MOBI containing every article, with a table of contents. Or the RSS feeds: Wallabag publishes a feed of unread items, one of favourites and one of the archive, each with a secret address, which an e-reader sync tool can poll automatically. The first is simpler, the second is forgettable in the good sense.
Extraction is not magic. A site that builds its page entirely in JavaScript, or hides its text behind a subscription, will yield an empty or truncated article: Wallabag then keeps the title and the link. Video and podcast pages do not turn into text. And it is not a faithful archiving tool: you keep the readable text and the images, not the exact layout of the original page — enough to read, not enough to prove.
App Essentiel, at €4.99/month incl. VAT. It provides 2 GB of memory where the application asks for 768 MB at minimum: the headroom serves the system, not the decor. You can change plan later without reinstalling.
Yes, and with this application that is the whole point: Wallabag exists because read-it-later services close. The software is free, your articles export to JSON, CSV and EPUB whenever you like, and the database reinstalls elsewhere as it is.