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.