📻 Castport
Host 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. $39 once, and your audio files are never held hostage.
Castport, as it actually looks — a real screenshot, not a mockup.
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.
Castport vs Transistor
Transistor at $19/mo runs roughly $228/year — $456 over two years. Castport is $39, 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.
Three steps, no subscription
Buy once on Whop
One-time $39 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.
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/castport, always. $39 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.
Deep-dive comparisons:
Own Castport forever
$39 once. Deploy on your own server — your data never leaves it. No renewal, no account with us, no meter. Or build it yourself from the MIT source — it's the same app.