Pocket Shut Down — Where to Move Your Saves Now

Pocket is gone. Mozilla shut the service down on July 8, 2025, switched it to export-only, and then — after a short extension to November 12, 2025 — deleted everything that hadn't been downloaded. The API was decommissioned along the way, so the integrations people relied on stopped working too.

If you're only finding out now, you're not alone, and this post is for you. There are really two situations, so let's take them one at a time.

If you saved your Pocket export before it closed

Good — that file is your whole library, and it's all you need. First, a detail that trips people up, because Pocket changed the format on the way out:

• Mozilla's final export arrives by email as a ZIP, holding one CSV per 10,000 saves. Unzip it and you'll have part_000000.csv and friends.
• Older exports are a single ril_export.html.

Cowpin reads both. Getting it in takes about two minutes:

1. Go to Settings → Bookmarks → Import and upload your export — the CSVs one at a time, or the HTML file if that's what you have.
2. Your saves come in with their tags, and your unread queue stays a queue: unread items arrive flagged read-later, archive and read items don't. Duplicates are skipped, so re-importing is safe if you're not sure whether something already landed.

I'll be straight about why that first bullet gets its own paragraph: until August 8, 2026 this post told you the CSV was "the standard bookmark format, so it just works," and it wasn't true. Pocket's CSV is its own layout, we only read the HTML one, and a CSV upload imported zero bookmarks without saying why. If you tried to move in before that date and landed an empty library, that was our bug and not your file — the same export works now.

That's it. A few things you get that Pocket didn't:

• Your saves are auto-archived. When a page is saved, Cowpin captures its text, so even when the original site goes down, your read survives and stays searchable. This is the exact failure mode that made losing Pocket hurt.
• Full-text search across titles, notes, and the archived article text — not just the title.
• Rediscover. The best part of a big archive is the stuff you forgot you saved. Cowpin resurfaces forgotten gems from your whole library — "you saved this two years ago, still worth a look?"
• You can leave whenever. One-click export back to a standard format. After Pocket, that shouldn't be a nice-to-have — it should be the price of entry.

If you didn't export in time

Then the hard truth is that the saves are almost certainly gone — Mozilla deleted what hadn't been downloaded after the November deadline, and there is no bulk recovery. Before you give up, spend two minutes on Mozilla's own Pocket support page in case a limited export is somehow still reachable for your account; I can't promise it is, and you shouldn't plan on it. Otherwise it's worth a pass through your browser history for anything critical.

The useful thing you can do is make sure it never happens again. The reason a shutdown could erase years of reading is that the list lived in one company's database and nowhere else. So when you pick the next home, hold it to a higher bar:

• Real import and export, in a standard format, so your library is always portable — not locked in.
• Archiving on your side, so a saved page survives the original going offline.
• Search across the full text, so a big archive stays useful instead of becoming a junk drawer.
• Ideally an open, documented API, so you're never at the mercy of one app's roadmap.

Cowpin is built around exactly that: your reads are archived so they don't rot, everything is full-text searchable, and there's a real API plus one-click export if you ever want to move on. The whole point is that you're never trapped the way Pocket users just were.

Where else you could go

This post used to name exactly one option, which is not much use to someone deciding. So here is the real field, with the trade-off that actually separates them. Licences and prices below were checked on 2026-08-08 against each project's own site and repository.

Instapaper — the closest like-for-like replacement if what you miss is Pocket itself: save an article, get a clean reading view, done. Weakest of the group at tagging and organisation, so it's a reading app more than a library.

Raindrop.io — the most common landing spot, and the easiest sell if you want something visual: collections, previews, apps everywhere, a generous free tier. The trade-off is that it's the opposite of minimal.

Readwise Reader — built for people who highlight everything and want those highlights to come back to them later. Paid, and unapologetically a power tool.

Wallabag — open source (MIT, ~13k stars). Self-host it for free, or take official hosting at wallabag.it from €11/year. The only kind of option that is structurally immune to another shutdown, because you can hold the server.

Karakeep — open source (AGPL-3.0, ~28k stars), self-host free or $4/month cloud, with AI tagging, full-text search and real iOS and Android apps. Worth knowing for your situation specifically: it ships a Pocket importer, so it takes your export directly.

Linkwarden — open source (AGPL-3.0, ~19k stars), self-host free or $3/user per month. Its focus is preservation: full-page backups so the page survives even when the site doesn't.

Cowpin — this one. Text-first and tag-first rather than visual, with archiving and full-text search included rather than sold as an upgrade, a real API, and one-click export back out. Best fit if you kept Pocket as a library you searched rather than a queue you drained. And the honest limits: no native mobile apps yet (an installable web app instead), and you can't self-host it — if that's your requirement, Wallabag or Karakeep is the better answer, not us.

The honest part

No tool is a perfect Pocket clone, and we won't pretend to be one. But if what you want is a modern, actively-built home that keeps your reads from disappearing and never holds them hostage, that's what Cowpin is for. It's free while we're finding our first users — every feature, no limits. Start here.