Omnivore Shut Down — Where to Move Your Highlights and Saves

If you're reading this because Omnivore is gone: it is, and it's not coming back. ElevenLabs acquired the team on November 1, 2024 and shut the service down on November 15 — a two-week window to export, after which all saved articles, highlights, and notes were permanently deleted. There's no read-only mode and no recovery. The team now works on ElevenLabs' own reader.

Omnivore stung more than the average shutdown, because it was the one a lot of technical readers had deliberately chosen: open-source, highlight-first, with a real API and clean export. If you picked it because it wouldn't lock you in, its disappearance is a particularly annoying kind of irony.

If you exported before November 15

Then your library is in that export ZIP — the article metadata, your highlights, your labels. Keep it somewhere safe; it's the only copy now. Hold onto it while you decide where to land, because the next step is choosing a home that won't put you through this again.

The Omnivore checklist for a replacement

Omnivore set a specific bar. Don't drop below it just to get resettled. A worthy replacement should have:

• Highlights and annotations — not just saving a link, but marking up what matters inside it.
• Real export, in open formats (Markdown, and ideally straight into Obsidian or Notion), so your notes stay yours.
• An actual API — the thing that made Omnivore programmable and scriptable.
• No lock-in — you can leave any time with your data intact. The whole point.
• Archiving and full-text search, so a saved page survives the original going offline and stays findable.

Where Cowpin fits

Cowpin is a bookmark-and-read-later manager built for people who want exactly that list — so let's be straight about each point:

• Highlights and annotations are a core feature, not an afterthought. Mark up the archived text of anything you save.
• Export to Markdown, Obsidian, and Notion in a click — your highlights come with you, because the reason you're here is that they didn't last time.
• A real, documented API (Pinboard-compatible), so the scripts and automations you built around Omnivore have somewhere to point.
• No lock-in — one-click export back out, always.
• Auto-archiving and full-text search across everything you save, so link rot doesn't quietly erase your reading.

The honest bit about importing

Cowpin's one-click importer reads the standard bookmark-HTML export that Pinboard, Pocket, and browsers produce. Omnivore's export is a richer ZIP, so pulling your highlights across isn't a single button today — your saved links come over easily, but the annotations need a hand. If that's you, start an account and tell us: Omnivore refugees are precisely the users we want, and a dedicated importer is the kind of thing we'll build for people who ask. We'd rather earn that than pretend it's already perfect.

The real lesson

Omnivore was open-source and still vanished in two weeks. The safeguard was never "pick the open one" — it was keep your own copy and use tools that let you leave. That's the bar Cowpin is built to clear: your reads archived so they don't rot, your highlights exportable, a real API, and the door always unlocked.

Cowpin is free while we find our first users — every feature, no limits. Start here.