What Just Read is

One click strips page styling, ads, popups, and comments and re-renders the article in a themeable reading layout, with selection and deletion modes for pages it extracts poorly. Premium adds saved and shareable reader pages, highlights, annotations, and auto-scroll; optional AI summaries use your own provider key.

Feature coverage

  • One-click reader view with themes and custom CSS
  • Selection and deletion modes to fix extraction
  • Optional AI summaries through your own API key

What stands out

  • Open source under GPL-3.0 on GitHub
  • Strong rating on a meaningful sample
  • Current maintenance, with an October 2026 update

Tradeoffs to know

  • Saving, sharing, and annotation need Premium
  • AI summaries need your own provider API key
  • Some layouts still need manual text selection

Permissions and privacy

Page access

Reformatting an article means reading the page you run it on. Manual use from the toolbar or keyboard shortcut only needs the page in front of you; the auto-run option is what needs standing access to chosen sites, so keep that list short or set site access to on click if you never auto-run it.

Data notes

The listing discloses website content. The developer says Just Read collects no data by default and stores only an email address if you create an account, which Premium uses. AI summaries send article text to the provider you pick (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or Perplexity), and the developer says your key never reaches Just Read's server.

Pricing

Free and open source; optional Premium at $2/month billed annually. Pricing and plan limits change more often than store metadata, so use the linked developer page as the final check before subscribing.

Alternatives

AlternativeReader ViewAlternativeHelperbird

Sources

We used the official Chrome Web Store listing and first-party developer material. Public metrics can change after the fact-check date.

  1. Chrome Web Store listing

    Rating, rating count, public users, version, update date, and publisher disclosures verified 2026-10-12.

  2. Just Read product documentation

    First-party product, feature, support, or project documentation used for workflow context.

  3. Extension Reviewer methodology

    How public claims, permissions, evidence, and tradeoffs are reviewed.

View in Chrome Web Store Developer site
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