OneTimeHost your own podcast: Apple/Spotify-valid RSS, player, stats — on your $5 VPS.
Podcast hosting is, under the hood, file storage plus an XML feed — and Transistor charges $19–99/month for it, forever. Castport runs the whole thing on your own $5 VPS or desktop: upload an episode, get an Apple/Spotify-valid RSS feed, clean public pages, an embeddable player and privacy-safe download stats. $99 once, and your audio files are never held hostage.
Castport in 60 seconds
Everything in the box
Upload episodes, get a valid RSS feed, public pages, embeddable player & download stats. Pay once.
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.
Castport vs Transistor
Transistor charges $19/mo. Here's what actually differs.
| Castport | Transistor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $99 once | $19–99/mo, forever |
| Cost over 3 years | $99 | $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 5.2 months against Transistor Starter — or a month against Growth. Over 3 years you keep $585–3,465.
Pick how you pay
Subscriptions if you want them — but the whole point is the lifetime tier.
Up and running in three steps
Buy once on Whop
One-time $99 for the packaged installer (Windows desktop app + guided VPS deploy) with lifetime updates.
Deploy and point your domain
docker compose up on a $5 VPS, put Caddy or nginx in front for TLS, and set BASE_URL to your real https:// domain.
Upload and submit
Upload your first episode, then submit /feed/your-show.xml to Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters. Done.
Fair questions
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.
What about listener privacy?
Download stats hash IPs with a rotating daily salt, so you get unique-downloads-per-day trends without ever storing anything personal — and the data sits in your SQLite file, not a third party's dashboard.
How do backups work?
Copy three things: one SQLite file, the audio folder and the artwork folder. That's the entire state of the app.
Related tools
More pay-once apps from the OneTimeSuite catalog.
A self-hosted markdown blog with zero-JavaScript public pages. Pay once, publish forever.
A fast, keyboard-first RSS reader you host yourself.
Send big files from your own server. Resumable uploads, expiring links, no subscription.
Every snippet you've ever written, searchable in one place. Pay once.
More about Castport
Every page we publish about this app — comparisons, personas, platforms and the problems it solves.
For you
Stop renting. Own Castport.
Upload episodes, get a valid RSS feed, public pages, embeddable player & download stats. Pay once.
Get Castport — $99 forever