About The Podcast App

The Podcast App started from a simple annoyance: opening a podcast app should not feel like fighting through a subscription upsell before you can press play. Most big podcast apps are owned by a media company, a music-streaming platform, or an ad network, and their incentives show up in the product - banners between episodes, playback features held back until you subscribe, or a queue that nudges you toward whatever content someone else paid to promote. We wanted a player where subscribing to a show, building a queue, and hitting play just worked, for free, without anyone's business model getting between you and the audio.

Free core listening has to be paid for somehow, and we chose the most direct route: an optional Brain subscription for AI-powered search and episode summaries, and nothing else. There is no app-inserted advertising inside episodes, no data-broker relationship selling your listening habits to marketers, and no artificial cap on downloads or speed controls designed to make the free tier annoying enough that you upgrade. If you never touch Brain, you are using the identical player as someone who pays for it. The business exists because some listeners find enough value in the AI layer to pay for it directly, not because your attention is the product being sold.

That funding choice shapes the values we try to hold ourselves to: privacy first, meaning your listening history and any Brain conversations are not sold or repurposed for ad targeting; honesty about limits, meaning if something does not work - a feed that will not load in the browser player, a show with no transcript for Brain to search - we say so instead of papering over it with a vague error message; and a listener-first bar for every feature we ship, where the real question is always whether it makes listening better, not whether it increases time-in-app or ad impressions.

We also believe podcasting should stay an open medium, not a collection of walled gardens. The app is built on standard public RSS feeds and the open Podcast Index rather than a proprietary catalog, so your subscriptions stay portable: import an OPML file from whatever app you used before, and export the same way if you ever want to leave. No show is exclusive to us, no feed is held hostage, and no listener is locked in. That commitment to the open podcast ecosystem is not a marketing line - it is the actual technical foundation the app is built on.