As a pocket casts user idk why it even costs money to run this app. Just developer cost? Almost all the work is just local on the device and fetching the RSS feed? Anyone else know why this needs external servers at all?

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rbits 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think they have their own podcast index that you can search through. They also sync your listening progress to the cloud. But with PocketCasts Plus being $66 AUD/year, surely those subscriptions are enough to cover the costs.

I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.

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galaxy_gas 3 days ago | parent [-]

Having peek at the feature set I cannot imagine how this to cost more then handful of subscriber of revenue to run~

They do not host any media -- The volume of post searching fulltext is so small single PSQL instance can take over -- your listening progress is a single integer ...

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mcv 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, but they need money to pay for developers to enshittify the app.

	▲	wobfan 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This. The app is virtually indifferent to what it looked like literally 4 years ago, apart from having some more rounded edges and some different animations. I know there will have been some required changes from Apple/Google, but it will not be a lot. Also, the sync is nice, but if the 5 MBs of metadata are so expensive why not change that to use GDrive/iCloud instead or allow to locally sync your progress? The app and their service is not worth the extremely high cost of a mere podcast player which downloads data from external sources and plays it on my phone. I also paid for Pocket Casts Plus when it was ,99 or $2 (I don't remember) per month because I liked to upload my own podcast files, but since it was raised to idk 4$ I am not ready to pay anymore.

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tantalor 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

	▲	galaxy_gas 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		at least have cost of storing the media that Dropbox need pay. In this case there is none of that. [[ I do understand there is a small distinction here, in that the Dropbox reference is for a user that will self host the storage server, but in the context of this message I refer to the SAAS host or owner of Pocket Casts I cannot imagine to be losing 800k a year even at AWS pricing given what the app does or something is written very wrong ... ]]
	▲	vachina 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is still true until today. Except it’s even more doable today with cheap storage and high bandwidth consumer internet.

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vachina 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Cloud bills are no joke.