GoodLinks
A pay-once read-it-later app for Apple users: save anywhere, read offline, sync over iCloud, no account.
About
GoodLinks is the read-it-later app for people who live in the Apple ecosystem and are tired of subscriptions. It is a universal app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with a one-time $9.99 purchase that includes a year of feature updates; after that, new features can be unlocked with a modest in-app purchase, but what you bought keeps working forever. There is no account: everything syncs over your own iCloud, and the developer states no tracking and no data collection.
Saving works through the share sheet and a Safari extension, with tag autocomplete, and each article's full text is downloaded per device for offline reading and full-text search later. Highlights and notes, per-device customization, deep Shortcuts support, and a URL scheme for automation round it out. The hard limits are the platform: Apple only, and there is no free tier to try before buying, though the App Store rating sits around 4.7 with reviewers consistently praising the capture quality. It can log into paywalled sites to retrieve content. No independent benchmarks are published.
What it can do
- One-time purchase, no subscription and no account
- Sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac over iCloud
- Offline reading with full article text saved per device
- Tags, highlights, and notes with autocomplete
- Full-text search across saved article contents
- Share sheet and Safari extension for one-tap saving
- Deep Shortcuts actions and URL-scheme automation
- Customizable reader with per-device settings
- Can retrieve content from paywalled sites you log into
- Export your data easily at any time
Setup
Buy GoodLinks once on the App Store, enable the Safari extension, and save from the share sheet.
Prerequisites
iPhone, iPad, or Mac on recent OS versions. One-time $9.99 purchase; iCloud for sync.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: MacSources' 2026 review and long-running user reviews confirm the $9.99 one-time model with a year of feature updates, iCloud sync with no account, per-device offline article storage, and ~4.7/5 App Store sentiment. Strengths: no subscription, no account, no tracking; genuinely polished Apple-native experience; strong capture quality per reviewers. Docked for: (1) Apple-only, so mixed-ecosystem users are out; (2) no free tier to evaluate before paying; (3) new features after year one need a paid unlock. License: proprietary paid (one-time).
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · $9.99 one-time incl. 1yr of feature updates
- · iCloud sync, no account, no tracking
- · Apple-only; no free tier
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.