A sign of a good tool is that you don’t notice it - one year with wallabag

A year ago in June, 2025, when Mozilla shut down Pocket, I took a look at the alternatives and ended up choosing wallabag. I’ve been using it daily ever since.

I recently received an email that my yearly subscription is coming to an end and if I’m still enjoying it, I should resubscribe. First of all, how awesome it is that they are not relying on people forgetting to cancel their subscriptions as a way to make money (as so many subscription services these days unfortunately do). Second, I realised how little I’ve been thinking about wallabag since last summer.

How I use wallabag

I was asked in Mastodon how I use wallabag daily so here are my main use cases:

First use case is to capture good articles I want to make notes about when I'm reading them on mobile or tablet — or when I’m too tired after a long day to think but I’m relaxing by reading. That way, wallabag offers me a good place to find all of them when I sit down on my laptop to make notes. Usually I clear up my queue of those once or twice a week.

Second is to capture interesting things I run into when I'm going down the rabbit hole on something else but don't have time to read them right away or reading them would be a distraction. I don’t have to leave them open in tabs to hopefully remember to go back to later. When they are stored in my wallabag list, I’m guaranteed to go through them during the sessions where I go through my list and process everything.

These two use cases are more of a bookmark service than read-it-later service with the added benefit of them being also often directly readable through wallabag’s interface if needed.

Third use case is to store articles for offline reading. I travel quite a lot and often I'm without an internet either while in trains in the countryside or if I take a ferry to mainland Europe which is often ~30+ hour trip without Internet.

When I'm without internet, I love to have a lot of interesting bits to read and wallabag is fantastic for that.

I keep my list clean: short-lived articles (use cases 1 and 2) I remove as soon as I've read and made notes about them and the long-term (case 3) ones I usually clear after a trip unless there are some bangers that I keep for a longer time and re-read on future trips.

Other than a small handful of exceptions, wallabag is a temporary location for stuff. My notes are the long-term storage for anything worth keeping because that’s where I can find them when I think and there I can link them with other articles on the topic and my notes are always at hand, stored locally in Markdown files so if a server has a hiccup or a service shuts down, I don’t lose them.

Not noticing the tool you use is a good thing

We’re (hopefully) at the peak of attention economy where everything and everyone is pushing themselves to your face constantly in an attempt to steal some of your attention for their financial gain. I hate it.

Wallabag doesn’t do that. The tool itself is very unnoticeable in a good way. I have a browser extension on desktop and mobile so I can save things with a single click. I access the saved articles from a web UI.

I’ve got two emails (not including the payment receipts) since I signed up for my 1-year subscription. One that was a reminder that my year is ending and second was an update on the development of the service.

It’s unfortunate how refreshing it feels to use a tool like this. It should be the baseline from which only exceptions pop out but these days it’s a super rare treat.

Wallabag is available as a paid, hosted version but you can also self-host it if you’d like. That’s another reason I really like it. I’m currently happy to pay it to support the development but I do enjoy the fact that if they decide to shut things down some day, I can switch over to a self-hosted version and continue enjoying using it.

Thanks Nicolas for building wallabag!