Pocket shut down on 8 July 2025. Mozilla, which had owned it since 2017, said the closure reflected how differently people browse and save things now compared to when Pocket launched. If you were one of the people who saved articles all week and then read, or listened to, a backlog on the weekend, that habit needed a new home, and a lot of roundups since then have pointed at the same handful of apps: Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Raindrop and Matter.
Worth saying upfront: none of these four is a perfect one-for-one swap, because they were not all built to do the same thing Pocket did. If listening was the part of Pocket you actually used, it is worth understanding what each replacement does with that specific piece before picking one.
What people actually used Pocket for
Pocket was, first, a place to save an article with one tap so you would not lose it in a pile of open tabs. Second, and this is the part relevant here, it had a free built-in Listen feature that read saved articles aloud with a synthetic voice, no separate app or subscription required. That combination, frictionless saving plus free listening, is a big part of why people are hunting for a specific kind of replacement now rather than just any bookmarking tool.
The four replacements, and how each handles listening
Instapaper keeps a version of Pocket's approach: basic text to speech is free, and playlist-style continuous listening across saved articles sits behind Instapaper Premium, priced at around $6 a month or $60 a year at the time of writing on Instapaper's own pricing page. If what you want is closest to what Pocket offered, free listening with a paid tier for more, Instapaper is the most direct match of the four. Our full Instapaper vs ReadLoud comparison goes through the differences in voices and pricing.
Readwise Reader is less a Pocket replacement than a broader reading and highlighting system, saving articles, PDFs, EPUBs, email newsletters and more in one place, at around $9.99 a month billed annually (or $12.99 month to month) according to Readwise's Reader pricing page. It does read content aloud, but only while you are online, and reportedly does not preserve PDF layout when reading a PDF aloud. It is a serious tool for people who want highlights and notes as much as listening. See our Readwise Reader vs ReadLoud comparison for the fuller picture.
Raindrop is primarily a bookmark and organization manager, strong on tagging, folders and finding things again, across browser extensions and apps on most platforms. As far as we could verify, its reading-aloud capability is limited compared to a dedicated text to speech tool, so if listening specifically is the priority, Raindrop is a better fit for organizing what you save than for how you hear it.
Matter costs $8 a month or $60 a year according to Matter's own pricing page, and its text to speech is frequently singled out in roundups as the strongest built into any read-later app, alongside highlighting and note-taking. If you want one app that both saves and reads well, Matter is the one built most deliberately around that combination. Our Matter vs ReadLoud comparison covers the price math in more detail.
Where ReadLoud fits into this
ReadLoud is not trying to be a fifth read-later app. It does not save articles, build a reading queue, or let you tag and organize a library of links the way Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Raindrop and Matter all do to varying degrees. What it does is the other half of the job: turn whatever you paste, a saved link, a PDF, an EPUB, a document, into audio, with a proper library that tracks your progress and resumes at the exact sentence you stopped at, synced across your devices.
Paste a link and it gets extracted the way a reader view would, ads, navigation and comments dropped, then read aloud in one of 30 voices across four engines, with word by word highlighting measured from the real generated audio so you can follow along visually if you want to. There is no subscription: 1 minute is free with no account, 20 minutes free with a sign up, and after that credit is bought as minutes that never expire, from $9 for 60 minutes down to under 10 cents a minute on the largest pack. Everything generated is cached, so replaying something you already listened to does not cost anything again.
This makes ReadLoud a natural pairing partner rather than a straight competitor to any of the four apps above. Save and organize in whichever read-later app fits how your brain works, then paste the link into ReadLoud specifically for the listening. That is a genuinely common pattern already, since a lot of the roundups written after Pocket's shutdown recommend exactly this kind of two-tool setup rather than expecting one app to do everything Pocket used to.
Being fair about what you lose either way
None of this replaces Pocket's specific combination of dead-simple saving and free listening bundled in the same free app for free, and it is worth saying plainly that this particular combination has not really reappeared elsewhere. Every replacement here asks you to either pay for the listening (Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Matter) or to use two tools instead of one (any read-later app plus ReadLoud). If your Pocket use was genuinely occasional and light, it is worth honestly asking whether you need a dedicated setup at all, or whether an occasional paste into a free tier is enough.
Picking a setup
If you want one app that saves and reads reasonably well, start with Instapaper or Matter, and check their current pricing directly since it can change. If you want serious highlighting and note-taking with listening as a secondary feature, Readwise Reader is built for that. If you would rather keep saving separate from listening, and only pay for the minutes you actually generate, pair any of the above with ReadLoud for the audio itself, and try it free before deciding whether it is worth adding to your setup. For saved newsletters specifically, see our notes on newsletters and articles.