Paywall Halt

Have you ever been intrigued by a news story, but it was locked behind a paywall? Is there anything more frustrating than finding the exact math question you’re stuck on on Google, only to find Chegg charges a subscription fee? Well, our easy to use Chrome extension, Paywall Halt, solves all those problems and more!

To ease the frustration of researching, we built a Chrome Extension using the Chrome Storage API, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to flag Google search results as possible paywalls with a brief description of what you could expect. For example, sites like Netflix and Chegg will require a subscription to access any content whereas The New York Times will give you a few free articles a day.

After building the core prototype, we added a user inputted whitelist and blacklist to make their experience more customizable. A lot of people have Netflix and Spotify subscriptions so it would make sense for them to add these sites to the whitelist. On the other hand, some people may be annoyed by CNN’s abundance of ads, and would want to add it to the blacklist. Each user’s blacklist and whitelist can be managed from a dashboard, which we built using the Chrome Storage API, that lets users add sites to the appropriate list and view each list.

We believe that information should be accessible to all, not hidden behind blurred text or a pop up window. At the same time, we want to respect creators’ intellectual property rights. Paywall Halt strikes the perfect balance between informing internet users about the best sites to use, saving them from having to click through dozens of links—only to have them all behind paywalls.