Quick answer
Yes — Castport is a one-time-purchase alternative to Transistor. It costs $99 once, while Transistor runs $19/mo — about $228 per year, every year. Upload episodes, get a valid RSS feed, public pages, embeddable player & download stats. Pay once. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Transistor's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Castport if you are an individual or small team paying Transistor $19/mo for work your own machine can do. Pays for itself in 5.2 months against Transistor Starter — or a month against Growth. Over 3 years you keep $585–3,465.
Stay with Transistor if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Castport does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| 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 |
| 5-year cost | $99 | $1,140 |
Where Transistor still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Transistor's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Transistor is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Castport wins
- Price, permanently. $99 once versus $228/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- 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.
The math
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.
Common 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.
Try Castport — $99, one time
Or get Castport plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.