Pocket Casts announced that its flagship podcasts player is now free on Windows, Mac, and Web without restrictions. It had previously made its iPhone and Android apps available for free before open sourcing them too.
“The future of podcasting shouldn’t be locked behind walled gardens,” the Pocket Casts team says. “It should be free, open, and available to everyone—on any device, without restrictions. “That’s why we’re excited to announce that the Pocket Casts Web Player is now accessible to all, no subscription required … These changes also apply to our Mac and Windows Desktop Apps, giving you more ways to listen on your terms.”
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Starting immediately, anyone can stream any podcast episode directly from any Pocket Casts app with no account or subscription required. If you create a free account, you can sync playback progress between devices, manage your podcast queue, and save subscriptions and preferences.
The company also offers a Pocket Casts Plus subscription for $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year that provides folders for podcast organization, bookmarks, Apple Watch and Wear OS compatibility, audio file upload with 20 GB of cloud storage, extra themes and colors, and other perks.
“Podcasting was built on an open, decentralized standard, RSS, which means that anyone can create, share, and listen to content freely, without needing a specific platform’s approval,” the team explains of the shift. “But today, major platforms are shifting away from open standards, moving creators into proprietary systems that limit distribution and control discovery through algorithms.”
I do use and recommend Pocket Casts. At some point, I paid for the Windows, Mac, and Web clients, which at the time was part of a lifetime deal of some kind. But this is a terrific move on their part from a user experience perspective. It’s unclear what this means to Pocket Casts as a business.
