Transistor costs $19/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $684 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$19–99/mo, forever is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Castport: the pay-once alternative
Castport does the same core job for $39, once. Upload episodes, get a valid RSS feed, public pages, embeddable player & download stats. Pay once.
| Castport | Transistor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $19–99/mo, forever |
| Cost over 3 years | $39 | $684–3,564 |
| Shows | Unlimited | 1 to unlimited depending on tier |
| Downloads | Unlimited | Metered on lower tiers |
| Your own domain | Yes, natively | Paid plan only |
| Audio files | Always yours, on your disk | Hosted on their infra |
| Podcasting 2.0 chapters | Built in | Limited |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Pays for itself in 2.1 months against Transistor Starter — or under a month against Growth. Over 3 years you keep $645–3,525.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Transistor's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Castport is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Castport — $39, once
Upload episodes, get a valid RSS feed, public pages, embeddable player & download stats. Pay once.