spongeThe hosted Omnivore service is gone and its data was deleted in late 2024, so replacing it means either running the open-source code yourself or moving to another library. Omnivore was a free, open-source read-it-later that kept saved links, highlights, folders, and notes. On October 29, 2024 its team announced they were joining ElevenLabs, that users could export their data through November 15, and that the codebase would stay open source. A follow-up post extended exports to November 30, 2024, after which the service’s links, highlights, folders, and user data were erased. The announcement drew an immediate reaction from users on the repository, including issue 4459, titled “Seriously?”.
The code still exists. The omnivore-app/omnivore repository remains public, and its community built self-hosting support during the shutdown. Running it yourself means operating the whole stack, including the backend, the web app, and whatever mobile pieces you need, with no team maintaining it for you. ElevenReader, the product the team works on now, is a text-to-speech reader rather than a read-it-later. Omnivore’s own shutdown post pointed users to Readwise Reader or Wallabag.
Sponge is a private library for articles and PDFs that your own AI agent can research from. It is in Preview: you can sign in at sponge.computer and save a public link or a PDF, and Status and limits lists which parts are verified and which are still being checked.
If you used Omnivore
There is nothing left to pull from the hosted service. If you kept an export, read the saved URLs out of it and send each one through Sponge’s save-link command, using the loop described in Move a Readwise Reader library to Sponge. If you are weighing self-hosting the Omnivore code against a hosted library, remember that self-hosting is ongoing operations work: the repository is there, but the service behind it is not.
What Sponge offers instead
- A private library that keeps a readable copy of each saved page, with your highlights and notes attached.
- An API and a local MCP server for agents. Credentials are scoped and expire, with scopes such as
library:writeanddocument:write. Every write carries an idempotency key, and each edit names the revision it builds on, so a stale write cannot replace a newer document. - Highlights anchored to the saved copy’s text, and an export bundle for each source, verified by checksum.
Sponge covers less than Omnivore did. It saves public web pages, PDFs with extractable text, and supported text files, with no feeds, newsletters, or video.