📻 Castport
Host your own podcast: Apple/Spotify-valid RSS, player, stats — on your $5 VPS.
Castport at a glance
| Price | $99, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Transistor at $19/mo — roughly $228 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Video & Audio |
Castport features
♾️ Unlimited shows & episodes
Each show gets its own artwork, iTunes category, language, explicit flag and custom feed slug. No per-show pricing tiers.
📡 Apple/Spotify-valid RSS
RSS 2.0 with the full itunes namespace, exact enclosure byte lengths, permanent GUIDs and valid pubDates — the details that actually get feeds rejected, done right.
⬆️ Streaming uploads
MP3 or M4A streamed straight to disk — no buffering 200 MB files in memory — with markdown show notes, episode/season numbers and per-episode artwork.
📖 Podcasting 2.0 chapters
A chapters editor (start time + title) that also emits the podcast:chapters JSON endpoint modern apps read.
📅 Scheduling
Set a future publish date and the episode stays hidden from the feed and public pages until then — no cron job needed.
🎧 Public pages & embed player
Server-rendered show and episode pages with subscribe buttons and OG tags, plus an /embed iframe player with a copyable snippet.
📊 Privacy-safe download stats
Unique downloads per episode per day with a 30-day trend chart. Listener IPs are hashed with a rotating daily salt — nothing personal is ever stored.
⏩ Real HTTP Range support
Proper Range handling on audio delivery — required by Apple Podcasts and virtually every podcast app, and easy to get silently wrong.
$99 once — that's the whole pricing page
Transistor charges $19/mo — roughly $228 a year, every year. Castport is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Castport inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Castport guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/castport-mvp, always. $99 buys the packaged installer, guided deploy and lifetime updates.
Will Apple and Spotify actually accept the feed?
That's the part we sweated: exact enclosure byte counts (not estimates), permanent GUIDs, real probed audio durations, and proper HTTP Range support on audio — the exact details that get naive feeds rejected. Set BASE_URL to your real domain first; localhost feeds are rejected.
Who pays for the bandwidth?
You do — that's the honest trade-off of self-hosting. A $5 VPS comfortably serves a typical indie show; a genuinely huge audience is where Transistor's managed CDN infrastructure earns its monthly fee.