The read-it-later giant Mozilla shut down in July 2025: saved articles, offline reading, and 18 years of history.
Retired
Pocket appears to be discontinued or shut down — Mozilla shut down the service on July 8, 2025 after acquiring it in 2017; export window closed and all user data deleted October 8, 2025. This page is kept as an archive record and is excluded from search engines.
About
Pocket began in 2007 as Read It Later and grew into the defining save-for-later service, with Firefox integration, mobile apps, offline reading, and tag organization for its tens of millions of users. Mozilla acquired it in February 2017 and folded it into the Firefox orbit, adding editorial curation and recommendations.
In May 2025 Mozilla announced the shutdown: the service stopped on July 8, 2025, entered export-only mode, and all user data was permanently deleted on October 8, 2025, with Premium subscribers refunded automatically. Mozilla said it would refocus on Firefox itself. The closure pushed millions of users toward Instapaper, Raindrop.io, and wallabag. Pocket is listed here as a retired reference entry: it documents what the category's biggest product was, and its export format (HTML/CSV) is still the migration path most alternatives support. No independent benchmarks of its recommendation quality were ever published.
What it can do
- Was: save articles and videos for later across devices
- Was: offline reading and tag organization
- Was: Firefox integration and browser extensions
- Was: editorial recommendations and Pocket Hits newsletter
- Was: Premium with full-text search and permanent backups
- Now: retired; HTML/CSV exports importable into alternatives
Setup
The service is retired and the export window closed October 8, 2025. Migrate existing exports (HTML/CSV) into Instapaper, Raindrop.io, or wallabag.
Prerequisites
None: the product no longer exists. A previously exported HTML or CSV file is needed for migration.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 4/10
Scored 4/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: BetaNews and gHacks confirmed Mozilla's shutdown announcement, the July 8, 2025 service end, export-only mode, and October 8, 2025 data deletion with automatic Premium refunds. Strengths: historically the category leader (founded 2007, Mozilla-acquired 2017), so the entry documents the reference product. Docked for: (1) the product is fully retired with no path back; (2) the export window has closed, so latecomers lost data; (3) no open-source release or successor. License: was proprietary freemium; now retired.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 5.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 1.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 1.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 4.0/10
- · Mozilla shut down service 2025-07-08; data deleted 2025-10-08
- · Founded 2007 as Read It Later; Mozilla acquired 2017
- · Reference entry: export window closed
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.