Your Pocket library should not disappear with Pocket
Mozilla shut Pocket down in 2025. The alternatives are subscriptions: roughly $28 to $120 a year, your articles on someone else's server, and your highlights locked in their format. PocketRescue is a planned local-first tool that imports your exported Pocket archive, saves a permanent offline copy of every article it can fetch, and makes the whole library full-text searchable on your own machine. It is not built yet. This page exists to answer one question first: do enough former Pocket users want a one-time rescue tool instead of another subscription?
Why this shape
The event is real: Pocket shut down on July 8, 2025, and mainstream outlets (TechCrunch, ZDNET, Fast Company, 9to5Mac) all published migration guides — a large displaced user base had to move somewhere.
People already pay in this category: Raindrop Pro is $28/year, Readwise (with Reader) is $9.99–$12.99/month, Matter Premium is about $8–$14.99/month, Recall Plus starts at $10/month (prices checked October 2026 from published pricing summaries).
The recurring gap: every surviving option is a subscription with cloud storage. None of the mainstream alternatives offers a one-time purchase that simply makes your existing archive permanent and searchable, locally.
Honest limits, stated up front: a local tool cannot fetch articles that are already gone or fully paywalled; it preserves what your export lists and what is still reachable. It also has no mobile sync — if you need phone reading above all else, say so in the registration email; that answer matters to this test.
Planned capabilities (none of this exists yet)
Import a Pocket export file (the HTML/CSV archive Mozilla offered)
Fetch and store a permanent, readable offline copy of each article, with its title, tags, and date saved
Full-text search and tag browsing across the whole rescued library, entirely on your machine
Export everything back out as plain files (Markdown/HTML) at any time — no lock-in by design
Free check (planned): import your export and see a report of how many articles are rescuable, before paying anything
Who this is for
Former Pocket users whose export file is sitting in a downloads folder, unopened
Readers who refuse a fourth or fifth reading subscription on principle
If a subscription service already covers your needs, you do not need this — say so in the registration email; it still helps the decision
Indicative price (not a live price — nothing is for sale, no payment is taken)
$29 one-time
PocketRescue is not built yet. Nothing is for sale today, and no payment is taken. If it is built, the indicative price will be $29 one-time. Development only begins if 20 people join the waitlist by November 10, 2026; otherwise, the project is dropped and registrants are notified by email. Registering means sending one email and answering what you use for read-later today — and whether you still have your Pocket export.
The price and threshold are test parameters for this validation, not market conclusions.
Questions
Can I use it now? No. Nothing has been built; this page is the whole thing.
Does registering mean I have to buy it? No. It only means "notify me if it launches". Decide when there is a real product to look at.
What if some of my articles can no longer be fetched? That will happen for some links. The planned free check reports exactly how many are rescuable before you pay anything, and the export keeps at least the title, URL, tags, and date for the rest.
Why validate before building? Read-later is a category with strong subscription incumbents. Building first and hoping would waste your attention and my time; a signup count plus real answers about current tools is a cheaper, more honest test.