Omnivore's hosted service closed on 15 November 2024. Unlike Pocket, which shut down and left its users to scatter across several existing apps, Omnivore had a specific and slightly unusual second act: its team joined ElevenLabs, the company behind the AI voice product ElevenReader. That detail matters for anyone trying to figure out where to go next, because it is not a coincidence that the people who built a reading app ended up somewhere focused specifically on listening.
What Omnivore users actually valued
Omnivore stood out from other read-later apps for reasons that were more technical than most people care about, until the app they relied on disappears and those reasons suddenly matter a lot:
- It was open source. The code was public, which meant anyone could inspect it, contribute to it, or in principle keep running it independently of Omnivore the company.
- It could be self-hosted. Instead of trusting a company's servers with your reading list, you could run Omnivore on your own infrastructure and keep full control of your data.
- It had a genuine reading and listening experience, not just a bookmark list. It tried to be a full alternative to Pocket, including some support for having articles read aloud, as part of one open app rather than a bookmarking tool with a listening feature bolted on.
People who specifically sought out Omnivore, rather than landing on whichever read-later app was popular that year, tended to care about the first two points as much as the third. Losing an open source, self-hostable option is a different kind of loss than losing a closed commercial app, because there is no company that can simply un-shut-it-down or offer a discount to stay.
Honest options now
If self-hosting and open source are what you actually valued: Wallabag is the option worth knowing about. It is free, open source software you install on your own server, with browser extensions and mobile apps that connect to it, similar in spirit to what Omnivore offered. It gives you the same kind of ownership over your reading list that Omnivore did. It does not include a built-in text to speech feature comparable to a dedicated reading app, so if listening matters to you, plan to pair it with something else for that part specifically, which is a reasonable and common setup rather than a workaround.
If you just want a hosted app that saves and organizes articles well: Readwise Reader, Raindrop and Matter are the names that come up most often in roundups written since both Pocket and Omnivore closed. Readwise Reader leans toward highlighting and note-taking across many source types, at around $9.99 a month billed annually per Readwise's pricing page, with listening available but online only. Matter, at $8 a month or $60 a year per Matter's pricing page, is frequently called out for having the strongest text to speech built into a read-later app. Our comparisons of Readwise Reader and Matter against ReadLoud go into more detail on each.
If you want to see where the Omnivore team actually went: ElevenReader is worth a look, since it is where several people behind Omnivore ended up. It has a free tier and a paid tier, reportedly around $99 a year or $11 a month, though usage is metered by characters and the paid tier reportedly still caps out somewhere near 10 hours of listening a month. Check ElevenReader's own pricing directly, since usage caps and pricing on any app can change.
Where ReadLoud fits, and where it does not
ReadLoud is not open source and it is not something you can self-host, so if that was the actual reason you liked Omnivore, ReadLoud will not scratch that itch, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What ReadLoud does share with what made Omnivore appealing is treating listening as a first-class thing rather than a secondary feature: paste a link, upload a PDF, EPUB, DOCX or other document, and it is read aloud in one of 30 voices across four engines, with word by word highlighting measured from the actual generated audio and a library that remembers exactly where you stopped.
There is no subscription and no monthly cap that resets. 1 minute is free with no account at all, 20 minutes free with a sign up, and after that you buy minutes that never expire, starting at $9 for 60 minutes and dropping to under 10 cents a minute on the largest pack. Everything you have already generated stays cached, so going back to something you listened to before does not cost anything the second time.
The honest way to think about it: Omnivore covered saving, organizing and some listening in one open, self-hostable app. No single thing on this list replaces all three at once the way Omnivore did. Pick the piece that matters most to you, self-hosting with Wallabag, organization with Readwise Reader or Raindrop, built-in listening with Matter, or a dedicated pay-per-minute listening layer like ReadLoud that you can pair with whichever of the others you choose for saving.
What this says about the category generally
Two independent read-later apps closing within roughly a year of each other, Omnivore in November 2024 and Pocket in July 2025, is worth noticing rather than treating as two unrelated events. It suggests running a free or cheap reading app with real infrastructure costs, storage, extraction, and in Omnivore's case listening, is harder to sustain long term than it looks from the outside, especially without a clear path to revenue. That is part of why most of what replaced both of them charges something, Readwise Reader, Matter and ElevenReader's paid tier among them, rather than trying to repeat the free, ad-free model either one offered while it lasted.
It also explains why self-hosting keeps coming up in these conversations even for people who have never run a server before. An app you host yourself cannot be shut down by someone else's business decision, though it comes with the real cost of you being the one responsible for keeping it running, backed up, and updated. That trade-off is worth being honest with yourself about before choosing Wallabag purely out of caution about another shutdown, rather than because you actually want to manage a server.
Getting started
If listening is the part you miss most, the fastest way to know whether ReadLoud fits is to paste something you would have saved to Omnivore and hear how it sounds. Try the free minutes with no account needed, and see current pack pricing if you decide you want more. For a broader look at read-later apps generally, our Pocket alternatives guide covers the same ground from a different angle.