Pocket Casts, You Altered the Deal, So I Will Alter Your App
37 comments
·September 23, 2025wmichelin
rmunn
If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business, because nobody will trust you (if they're wise, though there are always some people/companies who will be foolish).
If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid.
Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. So the original deal (pay once for something that costs us ongoing money) was a stupid business decision. Doesn't change the fact that they undertook to make that contract. So now they should be held to it.
And the fact that someone else bought them does not invalidate the contract. When you acquire a business, you acquire their contractual obligations. As it should be, otherwise contracts cannot be trusted in the long run.
hiAndrewQuinn
Well, does anyone actually have a copy of the contract from 14 years ago? Usually there are clauses hedging against this kind of thing.
Example: I recently wrote the T&S for my Finnish dictionary app (still working on it), and I make it clear in advance that the license was a one time fee for perpetual use for that major version. [1]
I can do this because the app is almost entirely offline, and because for the parts that are, smart cloud infra decisions means my recurring infra costs are low. If I add in features which imply a bespoke server down the line, of course that would probably be a major version upgrade - and a change in the pricing model to boot. But I'd still keep the old v1 stuff up for the lifers.
[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/terms-of-service/#91-pricing-and-...
JumpCrisscross
> If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business
We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.
baby_souffle
I don't think they owned Pocket casts all the way back then...
simultsop
If people/companies want to support a thing they think should exist, it is their sacrifice to keep it alive. I don't think as them being stupid.
For the concerns of contracts, you are not alone on the suffering side. Alltogether humanity elevated tolerance to this level, this is not a surprise.
jszymborski
> why does the author here feel so entitled
People were promised they just needed to pay one fee to get the app.
Then, they went to a subscription fee, but grandfathered in previous purchasers.
Now, they've introduced ads.
Their overhead is their problem, they sold me something and now they are renegging. It's like the first thing in the article, not exactly burried.
toofy
it seems to me that we desperately need to get back to a place where a business is held to their word.
we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.
i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.
i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.
i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”
mrheosuper
Back in the day, Pepsi had an ads that claim you can win a Jet fighter if you do xxx. A guy did xxx and tried to get the Jet, but of course he couldn't and sue them. The court let Pepsi win.
So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.
derektank
I think it is sort of incumbent upon you, as a business offering a lifetime membership, to properly invest some of that initial fee, such that the returns cover future operating costs. Many other companies work on this model.
If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships.
This particular situation is more of a grey area, but I don't think maintenance and operating costs are a sufficient excuse.
CharlesW
Is Automattic a struggling business? Also, podcasters are paying for media hosting. Automattic presumably hosts a catalog service, but it can’t be that expensive to run.
cwyers
`Is Automattic a struggling business?`
I mean, everytime I see someone talking about them on Twitter, they are clearly struggling with _something_.
muppetman
Because we paid to not have to put up with this garbage. There's so many better ways to do this - look at nzb360 - https://nzb360.com/
They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.
Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.
"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"
galaxy_gas
Automattic are struggling business ?
rmunn
This has nothing to do with the content of the article, but is anyone else annoyed by that link style, or is it only me? To me, the link style where the underline partially overlaps the baseline of the text (not just characters with descenders like g and q and y, but the actual baseline so that it overlaps nearly all characters) harms readability.
I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it into a highlight on the word, but that's not a huge readability issue because the highlight covers the entire character. But having the non-hovered link underline be fat, so that it partially overlaps the baseline of the characters, means that those characters are superimposed on two different backgrounds, pale blue and pale red, and that harms readability.
This site isn't the only one that does this, or I might not be complaining. It's a style that seems to be popular, and I really don't know why. It's a bad idea and people should stop doing it.
climb_stealth
Agreed. I would not have realised they were links if I had not read your comment.
mtoner23
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?
rbits
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.
galaxy_gas
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 ...
tantalor
Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
vachina
Cloud bills are no joke.
WD-42
I switched to Pocket Casts because the official Apple app changed their UI to a recommendation feed instead of a plain timeline. I only listen to podcasts on a single device, anyone have suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying a one time fee, but this should really be a mostly (completely?) cloud-less app.
ghqst
A lot of podcast apps have a server for crawling the RSS feeds for you.
mantra2
Damn, he pulled a “Secure Custom Fields” on Automattic.
zmmmmm
have just been in the process of rage uninstalling this app due to the ads
To be clear, it's not just that they added ads, but they are obnoxiously in the main active screen while things are playing. Made me also disrespect Automattic as well as this seems very poor behaviour on their part.
nba456_
this site scans your ports
donatj
$800,000 net loss? What in the mismanaged business world are you even doing? I've built feed aggregators in the past... I just can't understand where the costs ar.
Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.
mgrandl
They are definitely not rehosting. I can tell that certain podcasts are streaming with much more latency compared to others hosted closer to where I live.
forrestthewoods
> You were a pay-once app. Released in 2011, pay once each for Android, iOS, and Web and keep for life.
You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.
I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
danpalmer
It's reasonable to feel that reneging on the deal is wrong, while also recognising that $5 for 14 years (and counting) of value is far too low a price. There's no good answer here.
The company is stuck in a bad place where the most loyal users, probably those getting the most value out of it in the long run, aren't paying for it. Subscriptions for newer users are one way, or trying to upsell existing users, but this subscription is exceptionally expensive for what it is, and they can only monetise the non-standard feature set.
I'd like to see a return to versioned software. Call Pocket Casts done, fork it, release Pocket Casts 2 for $20 with all these features. Next year release Pocket Casts 3 for another $20. People can update or not, up to them.
rbits
I don't think they're complaining about a lack of updates
bigfishrunning
If they just didn't update it, that would have been fantastic. It's the updates that added ads which are the problem.
To play devil's advocate here, clearly there are hosting costs and maintenance costs beyond a one time mobile app payment 14 years ago.
Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.