The price anchor
| Castport | Transistor | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $19/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $228 |
| 5-year total | $99 | $1,140 |
| 10-year total | $99 | $2,280 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($19/mo, ~$228/yr); the Castport column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
Pays for itself in 5.2 months against Transistor Starter — or a month against Growth. Over 3 years you keep $585–3,465.
- After 1 year: Castport has cost you $99 total — Transistor has cost $228.
- After 3 years: Castport is still $99 — the subscription is at $684.
- After 5 years: Castport is still $99 — the subscription is at $1,140.
What you get for $99 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.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $99 is the whole price.
Pricing 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.
Castport — $99, one time
Or get Castport plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.