Article summarizer

The 8,000-word essay, in the time it takes to make coffee.

Paste any article URL — news, Substack, blog, Medium, research write-up. Readlis pulls the argument, the evidence, and the quotes worth keeping.

5 free summaries a month. No card.

What you get

  • Works on news sites, Substack, Medium, and personal blogs
  • Preserves section markers so you can find where each point came from
  • Quotes are pulled verbatim — never paraphrased or invented
  • Switch between TL;DR, bullets, or quotes-only
  • Save articles to your library and search across all of them later
  • Export to Notion, Readwise, Markdown, or PDF

Made for

  • Long-form essays on Stratechery, Not Boring, Stripe Press
  • Research papers and reports up to 20,000 words
  • Substack roundups and newsletter back-catalogs
  • Tabs you've had open for two weeks

How it works

  1. Step 1
    Paste the URL

    Copy the article link and drop it into Readlis. Paywalled or bot-blocked pages fall back to a hardened extractor before giving up.

  2. Step 2
    Readlis reads the full text

    The page is stripped of ads, nav, and comment noise, then read end to end — including 20,000-word reports that other tools truncate.

  3. Step 3
    Get the argument, not filler

    You get a TL;DR, the key points in the author's order, and verbatim quotes. Save it, listen to it, or ask follow-up questions of the text.

Example outputs

Real examples of what Readlis returns. Every summary is generated fresh — these are samples for reference.

Analysis
Tech strategy essay — 6,400 words

The author argues distribution advantages, not model quality, will decide the AI market, because model capability is converging faster than customer switching costs are forming.

  • Capability gaps between frontier models are narrowing quarter over quarter
  • Bundling into existing workflows beats standalone tools on retention
  • Pricing power sits with whoever owns the interface, not the weights
  • Quote captured verbatim on why enterprise pilots stall at procurement
News
Investigative feature — 4,100 words

Internal documents show the policy change was known to cause a service gap nine months before it was announced publicly.

  • Timeline reconstructed from three sets of leaked memos
  • Two named officials contradicted the public statement
  • The affected population estimate was revised upward twice
  • Section markers let you jump to each piece of evidence

FAQ

Is the article summarizer free?+

Yes — 5 summaries a month free, no credit card. Pro is $6.99/month for 500 summaries and Pro Max is $14.99/month for 2,000.

Does it work on paywalled articles?+

It works on anything publicly reachable. Hard paywalls that require a logged-in subscription can't be read — but you can paste the text or upload the PDF instead.

How long an article can it handle?+

Up to book length. Very long pieces are processed in sections and merged, so a 20,000-word report is summarized in full rather than sampled.

Will it invent quotes?+

No. Quotes are extracted verbatim from the source text, and the summary links back to the original so you can verify every claim.

Can I upload a document instead of a link?+

Yes. Pro members can attach PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB, and RTF files — including scanned PDFs, which are read with vision.

What languages are supported?+

17, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, and Chinese.

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