Pocket alternatives that read your articles aloud

Mozilla shut Pocket down on 8 July 2025. The API went dark that November and exported data was queued for deletion, which means the thirty-million-odd people who used it had to go somewhere. Search for where and you get the same list every time: Instapaper, Raindrop, Readwise Reader, Wallabag, Matter.

They are all capable tools, and most of them are built around reading. A couple will read an article aloud. So the question worth asking is not whether a tool has text-to-speech on its feature list — it is whether the voice is one you can stand for forty minutes rather than four. That is the thing that decides whether you are still listening in week three, and it is the one thing a feature list cannot tell you.

Judge it with your ears. Ours are on the home page and play without a sign-up.

Pocket did two jobs, and most replacements only replace one

The first job was capture: one click, article stripped of its navigation and ads, stored somewhere you could find it later. Every tool on that list does this, several of them better than Pocket did.

The second job was the one nobody solved. Saving an article is a promise to spend twenty minutes on it later, and reading needs a specific kind of twenty minutes — eyes free, hands free, somewhere quiet. Most people's days contain very little of that, which is why the queue grew instead of shrinking.

If that describes your Pocket list, the useful question is not which app saves articles best. It is which one can put an article into a part of your day that was already free — a commute, a walk, washing up, a run.

What to look for if you want to listen, not read

"Text to speech" appears on a lot of feature lists and covers wildly different experiences. Four things separate something you will actually use from something you try once:

• Voice quality you can tolerate for an hour. A robotic voice is fine for a paragraph and unbearable for a feature-length article. This is the difference between a tool you use and a tool you abandoned in week one.
• Playback that survives a locked screen. A great many browser-based readers stop the moment your phone sleeps, which makes them useless for exactly the situations listening is for. We wrote about why that happens and what fixes it.
• Audio that persists. Speaking a page live means starting over every time. Audio generated once and stored can be replayed, resumed where you left off, and reached from another device.
• An honest ceiling. Nearly every option is free up to some limit. The limits differ enormously and are rarely on the pricing page in plain language — see what "free" tends to mean.

What listening is actually for

Long-form journalism, essays, newsletters, blog posts, reports — anything that is one continuous piece of writing you were going to read start to finish. That is the bulk of most saved lists, and all of it works at least as well by ear as by eye.

Reference material is the exception, and it is an exception about audio rather than about any particular tool: tables, code and equations do not survive being spoken, and if the job is finding one paragraph then skimming wins. Read those. Everything else is fair game, and following the text on screen while it plays covers the denser end.

What we built

ListenMore exists because of the second job. You give it a link or paste some text, it pulls out the article and drops the clutter, and it generates audio in one of six studio-quality voices. That audio is stored in your library, so it replays for free and resumes where you stopped, and it keeps playing with your phone locked and the screen off, with the usual controls on your lock screen and in the car.

It is built around finishing rather than filing. There are no tags, folders or highlights, because the problem we went after is not where your articles live — it is that the ones you saved with real intent never got read. Audio moves them into the part of your day that was already free.

There is a Chrome extension that sends the page you are on straight to your library, and the app installs to your home screen without an app store. Beta is free, capped at twenty minutes of new audio a week, with no card on file.