Mozilla shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025. If you are landing here from a search, you probably already know: the apps stopped working, the browser extensions were pulled back in May 2025, and the export window closed in November 2025. Millions of saved articles went looking for a new home. This guide covers what actually happened, the one hard truth about your old saves, and how to pick a replacement that will not do this to you again.
What happened to Pocket
The timeline, from Mozilla's own support page:
- May 22, 2025: Pocket removed from app stores. New sign-ups and Premium renewals disabled.
- July 8, 2025: Pocket shut down. Apps and sync stopped working.
- November 2025: The export-only window closed. Mozilla began deleting remaining Pocket accounts and data.
Pocket had over 10 million users. Mozilla said the way people save and consume content had evolved and it wanted to focus on Firefox. Whatever the reason, the pattern is worth naming: when your reading list lives on someone else's server, it lasts exactly as long as that company's strategy does.
The hard truth first
If you exported your Pocket library before the window closed in November 2025, your saves are safe and you can move them. If you did not export in time, Mozilla has deleted the data and no tool can get it back, including ours. Anyone promising otherwise is not being straight with you.
Pocket's export was an HTML file of your saved links. If you still have that file sitting in your downloads folder, you are in good shape. Keep reading.
What to look for in a replacement
Pocket did a few jobs well: one-tap saving, a clean distraction-free reader view, sync across devices, and tagging. Any replacement should cover those basics. But after watching Pocket die, the questions that matter most are the structural ones:
- Can you get your data out? Full export in a standard format (HTML or JSON), available any time, not just during a shutdown fire sale.
- Can it survive its own company? Open-source software with a self-host option cannot be shut down out from under you. This is the single biggest lesson of the Pocket shutdown.
- Does search actually work? A read-it-later app becomes a write-only archive the moment you cannot find anything in it. Keyword search is table stakes; semantic search (find by meaning, not exact words) is what makes a large library usable.
Moving your Pocket export to Keepfor
Keepfor imports the standard bookmark HTML format, which is exactly what Pocket's export was. The importer also handles exports from browsers, Omnivore, and Instapaper, plus CSV and Markdown.
The honest version of the move:
- Find your Pocket export file (an
.htmlfile, usually named something likepocket.htmlorril_export.html). - In Keepfor, open the import and upload that file. Your saved links come in as library items.
- From there, every saved article gets a permanent snapshot, so the content survives even if the original page disappears. That is the other half of the Pocket lesson: Pocket saved links; Keepfor keeps the article itself.
What carries over cleanly: your links and titles. Treat tags and favorites as a fresh start rather than expecting a perfect transfer.
How Keepfor compares to what Pocket was
Pricing. Pocket was free with an optional Premium tier. Keepfor's hosted plans are Personal at $5/month or $55/year and Pro at $9/month or $90/year, with a 14-day free trial that does not ask for a card. If you never want to pay for software again, the open-source core is free to self-host on your own Cloudflare account, forever. That is the AGPL-3.0 license doing its job: nobody can take it away.
Reading. Clean reader view, same as Pocket. Permanent snapshots of every article, which Pocket did not reliably do.
Finding things later. This is where Keepfor pulls ahead of what Pocket ever offered: hybrid keyword plus semantic search across your whole library, AI summaries of saved articles, and automatic tagging.
The thing Pocket never had. Keepfor exposes your library to AI assistants through an open protocol called MCP. That means Claude or Cursor can search, summarize, and organize your saved articles directly. There is a separate guide on that if you are curious.
If you are still deciding
The short version: pick the tool that cannot strand you. Open source plus full export is the only combination that survives a shutdown. Everything else is a feature list.
Sources: Mozilla support article "Pocket has shut down" (support.mozilla.org); Mozilla's shutdown announcement (May 2025). Pricing from keepfor.me/pricing and the Keepfor Terms of Service.