Transistor is one of the best podcast hosts money can rent: unlimited shows on every plan, clean analytics, private podcasts for internal audiences, a built-in website, and distribution to every directory that matters. It is the tool podcast professionals recommend to each other, and its product quality backs that up.
But strip podcasting hosting to its mechanics and it is file storage plus an XML feed — a job a $5 VPS does comfortably. Transistor bills $19/month at the Starter tier (capped at 20,000 downloads a month) up to $99/month, which is $228 to $1,188 a year, forever, for as long as your show exists. Castport is that same job as a $39 one-time purchase: upload episodes, get an Apple/Spotify-valid RSS feed, public pages, an embeddable player and download stats, on infrastructure you own.
What Transistor does well
Transistor is genuinely excellent at podcast hosting:
- Unlimited shows on every plan — run a network from one account, which most hosts charge per show for.
- Professional analytics — IAB-certified download stats, trends, apps and geography breakdowns advertisers accept.
- Private podcasts — auth-gated feeds for members or employees, a real technical feature done well.
- The managed everything — CDN delivery at any scale, directory submission help, a website builder, support humans.
If your show sells ads that require IAB-certified numbers, or bursts to six-figure download days, managed infrastructure earns its fee.
Where the subscription model hurts
The subscription outlives your enthusiasm and keeps billing. Podcasts run for years — at Starter's $19/month a three-year show costs $684 in hosting; at Growth, $1,764. And Starter meters downloads at 20,000 a month, so a viral episode pushes you up a tier. All of that rent buys storage and a feed: the marginal cost of serving one more episode from your own VPS is effectively zero.
The custody question is sharper in podcasting than almost anywhere: your audio lives on their infrastructure and — more importantly — your RSS feed URL is your subscriber list. Every podcast app in the world points at that feed. Migration tools and redirects exist and Transistor plays fair, but structurally, whoever hosts the feed holds the audience. Self-hosting on your own domain means your feed URL is yours for the life of the show, no matter which software serves it.
Castport: the pay-once alternative
Castport is a $39, one-time purchase. Host your own podcast: Apple/Spotify-valid RSS, player, stats — on your $5 VPS. Castport takes feed validity seriously — RSS 2.0 with the full itunes namespace, exact enclosure byte lengths, permanent GUIDs, real probed durations and proper HTTP Range support on audio, which is what Apple's crawler actually checks. Around it: unlimited shows and episodes, markdown show notes, scheduling, Podcasting 2.0 chapters, clean public show/episode pages with subscribe buttons, an embeddable iframe player, and privacy-safe download stats (IPs hashed with a rotating daily salt). One SQLite file plus two folders is the entire backup. $39 once, MIT source.
The source code is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/castport — free to build and run yourself, forever. Buying the packaged version on Whop gets you the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates. Either way, there is no account, no telemetry and no renewal date.
Head to head
| Castport | Transistor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $19–99/mo |
| Cost over 3 years | $39 | ~$684–3,564 |
| Where your data lives | Your machine / your server | Audio + feed on their infra |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited use | 20k downloads/mo on Starter |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Who should stay with Transistor
Stay with Transistor if advertisers need IAB-certified analytics, if you need private/member podcasts, or if you never want to think about servers, TLS or backups — those are real services Castport does not replicate. Stay if a huge audience makes bandwidth a genuine engineering topic.
Switch if you run an indie show or small network: your feed on your domain, unlimited shows, episodes and downloads, honest per-episode stats, and hosting costs that end after $39 plus the VPS you likely already rent.
Making the switch
Step 1 — Buy once on Whop. One-time $39 for the packaged installer (Windows desktop app + guided VPS deploy) with lifetime updates.
Step 2 — 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.
Step 3 — Upload and submit. Upload your first episode, then submit /feed/your-show.xml to Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters. Done.
Common questions
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.
The bottom line
Subscriptions make sense when a service does ongoing work for you — hosting, syncing, multi-region infrastructure, human labor. They make much less sense when the work happens on your own hardware and the monthly bill is just a toll booth. Castport is our bet that for this job, most people are better served owning the tool: $39 once, pays for itself in 2.1 months against Transistor Starter — or under a month against Growth. Over 3 years you keep $645–3,525.
Castport is part of OneTimeSuite — 56 desktop and self-hosted apps built on the same principle: your hardware does the work, so you should not pay rent on it. Every app is a one-time purchase with MIT-licensed source on GitHub, no accounts and no telemetry. Want everything at once? OneTimeSuite Complete bundles the whole suite for a single flat $997.
Try Castport — $39, one time
Signed installer on Whop, or build it free from the MIT source. Your call.
Related comparisons: Buzzsprout alternative — or browse the whole pay-once suite.