Best Podcast Hosting in 2026? I Compared 5 Platforms (Honest Review)

The podcast landscape seems to be changing at breakneck speeds. I've been podcasting since like 2011, 2012, and a lot has changed since then. Basically, all we needed to do back in 2011 was record a conversation and upload it to one of the few podcast hosting platforms that existed at the time. But today, there is so much more to consider like the quality, how you're going to make money, the various features that help you get discovered, and of course, there is video, there's dynamic ads. There is so much for new podcasters to consider today that it can feel really overwhelming. Which is why I have spent the last few weeks diving deep into a bunch of different podcast hosting platforms to see how they measure up, what features do they offer, what's their pricing strategy, who really is the best host for beginner podcasters. And I should know I have been podcasting for 15 or so years and I have helped dozens maybe hundreds of podcasters get started. I'm a podcast and systems coach and I know how tough it could be, how timeconuming it can be to create and launch and make a successful podcast. which is why your podcast

hosting platform should help you, not be another painoint, not be another point of friction. So, in this video, you are going to see me compare RSS. com to a bunch of these other hosting platforms. I'll give you the pros and cons of each and then I'll tell you one- on-one who I think is better or who it's better for. And then at the end I will come back and I'll give you a recap and I'll tell you what you should look for in a podcast hosting platform and who I think you should go with. So let's get into the first comparison. All of the comparisons will have chapter markers and I will see you back at the end to wrap everything up. When I was in software development, I would have clients and co-workers come up to me constantly and say, "You know what we should do? We should add this feature. We should try this framework. We should check out this new tool. " And I always had the same answer. How does this help us achieve our goals? Or put another way, how does this help us focus in a world where it's easy to get caught up in the latest AI feature or keep adding features to software to add some perceived value. It's really important to think about your core mission and how you are focusing on it. And today I want to do a comparison between two really well-known podcast hosting platforms, rss. com and Buzzsprout. Hey everybody, my name's Joe Cassabona and I am the evangelist here at RSS. com and I have been around the block as far as trying hosting platforms go. I'm also a podcast coach and so I have clients coming to me asking me what I feel the best podcast platform is. And Buzzrout is one that comes up a lot and for good reason. They have a lot of great features. They have a really easy and clean interface and they have a great focus on education. But there are a few things that I generally warn my clients of when they are looking at Buzzrout. So today I wanted to dive in, take a look at Buzzrout, compare it to RSS. com, and then tell you when I think it's good to use Buzzprout, and when you should go with RSS. com. Let's dive in. Okay, so as I mentioned, there are a lot of pros to Buzzrout. They are considered very easy to use. They have a really clean strips down interface so you can get started quickly. They also have a heavy focus on education. They have a really good content creation arm where they are helping podcasters get up and running. They have monetization options similar to RSS. com's where you have dynamic ads or other ways to make money with your podcast. They also have AI features like magic mastering and co-host AI to make it as easy as possible to upload your recording, get it edited and mixed and then published. And they offer dynamic content which allows you to add a custom call to action or your own host red ad in the beginning, middle, or end of your podcast episode. I think this is a really compelling feature and one that we don't yet have at rss. com. You can have a live event that you're promoting that you can change out once the event happens. If you have an optin for your mailing list, you can add that in and if you ever want to change it, you can. Or if you have a sponsor for a Black Friday sale, you can take that ad down after the Black Friday sale happens. So there are a lot of really good use cases for that dynamic content feature, but there are also a lot of cons to Buzzrout. On their free plan, it is a 2hour per month limit. After that, your episode will get deleted after 90 days. So you basically have 90 days free where you can upload up to two hours of content. Then they charge by the hour. We'll take a closer look at that when we look at the pricing page. The other thing I would say, and this really goes to what I was talking about with Focus, is that there's potential feature bloat and fatigue. Yes, they've added a few really useful AI features for podcasters, but this kind of goes back to what I was saying in a previous video where we looked at Riverside. Riverside is amazing at the recording and editing side of things and their podcast hosting is lacking because that is not their area of expertise. With Buzzrout, they have decided to focus simultaneously on these two things. And when you're focusing on more than one thing, then you usually aren't the best at both. The last thing I'll say is that they do offer Buzz Sprout ads and they do take a pretty heavy cut of that ads revenue, but let's actually take a look at their pricing over at Buzzrout. So, you can start for free today, but I have noticed that they have updated this page since the last time I made a video comparing these two back in 2024 where they have completely depprioritized. They're not even showing that you get a free plan. And that I mean I get why they really want people to be on their premium plans. And there's a lot of good reason to be on your premium plans, but it kind of tells me that they're not super proud of their free plan. They definitely don't want people on their free plan. And so, as I mentioned, they charge by the hour for, if we switch to the monthly plan here, you get six, 15, or 35 hours per month. And again, if we look at that annually, right, maybe six hours seems like a lot, but 72 hours a year, that means if you go over an hour a few weeks per year, you are bumped up to double the cost because of the length of your podcast episode. And when you are adding video or there's other bandwidth limitations then these this particular limit can feel like it shrinks or that the cost gets up pretty high and you're saving 15 17 or 19% on the annual plan if you want to do it monthly. 6 hours per month is going to cost you $19 per month and 35 $79 per month. Now you do have uh pretty clear feature parity across everything when you are on a free plan. You have the ability to get listener support and subscriptions and Buzz Sprout ads. Those are the monetization features. You get a website and video sound bites and all of the normal features of a podcast host listed in directories, RSS feeds. You also get, you know, they've gamified things. So you do get the achievements, they get the guides. I mentioned the education aspect of it, that dynamic content and custom embed ads. The AI features are an additional investment. So, the AI features do not come with the $1939 or $79 a month. And in fact, if we go into the dashboard and we look at Magic Mastering and Co-Host AI, you can't even get those features until you are on a paid plan. So, when we are logged in and we go to the paid features plan, you we can see a clearer outline of what you actually get with everything. And so, at six hours per month and $19 per month, you get one podcast and then the optional add-ons are $5 per month for Magic Mastering and Cohost AI. Those features go up. You also get more podcasts on the bigger plan, so that's good. you get at $39 a month, you get 15 hours per month for up to five podcasts, which again, if this is up to 15 hours per month and five podcasts, you're looking at about 3 hours per month if you're going to have those five podcasts. So, that's really something else to consider is the hourly limitations can really impact if you do want to have multiple shows. And then the cost of the optional add-ons go up to $10 and $20 per month on these bigger plans. So, you can have multiple podcasts. You're still limited by the number of hours though and those AI features cost a lot more. And as I mentioned, right, maybe you saw this in my plan, they have deleted the episode that I uploaded and I have 71 days to recover it before it's completely gone. Before we get into the benefits of RSS. com, I want to share that we have a feature called cold storage where if you decide to take a break, we will hold your podcast for you. That means that you don't have to worry about leaving for a few months or more and then having

to start all over. Even if you're not paying for an RSS. com plan, we are going to keep your content safe and sound because we have fully focused on creating great podcast hosting for podcasters. That is our promise. That is why we are in the business. And so I do want to share what you get with RSS. com. We have our free plan right here on the listing page. You get unlimited episodes, unlimited audio, the embedible podcast player, a website, which by the way, when I signed up for Buzzrout a few years ago, you got a free adup supported website if you were on the free plan. It looks like today you need to upgrade to get a website at all. And maybe that's good, like you're not seeing ads on a free website, but it means you have to upgrade, which tells me that the Buzz Sprout free plan really is meant to be a try before you buy plan. They want you to go through and use the interface and see if you like it and then upgrade as quickly as possible, which is probably why they're not listing that free plan on their pricing page anymore. That's just a note I wanted to make. Our free plan gives you all of that stuff. Now, you do get basic analytics. People are wondering like what is the limitation of our free plan? You'll get basic analytics and some of our advanced features like dynamic ads, earning money with podcast subscriptions, team members, the unbranded player, and AI generated transcripts. Those are going to be on the paid plan. But if you want to have a free local or niche show without having to worry about the number of hours that you're uploading, without having to worry about if your episodes are going to get deleted in 3 months, then our free plan gives you that and you get more features with a higher price. And so we go all the way up to $1875 if paid annually. That's $18. 75. You get unlimited podcasts along with unlimited episodes. So like on the podcast networks plan, you can have as many shows as you want. episodes for each of those shows as you want as well as unlimited team member seats. So our virtually unlimited plan is less than the 6 hours per month plan on Buzzrout. Those are the things to consider. When should you use one versus the other? Well, the big thing is right now if you want that dynamic content feature, that is something that Buzzrout can offer you that you won't get on RSS. com. So, if that's important to you, then that's a feature that you'll need to find over on Buzzrout or some other host. If you want those AI features, if you want to pay the extra for those AI features and you want all in one place, then almost gets you there. I would say Riverside gets you there better, but some of those AI features, but they are going to come at a cost, right? If you want six hours a month, then you're looking at $30 a month as opposed to $19 a month for your for a one podcast 6h hour per month plan. So, those are things to consider. If you want to start a podcast on a host that is fully focused on creating a great way to manage your show for the long term, if you don't want to worry about the number of hours you're uploading or the number of episodes you're uploading, then rss. com is the place for you to go. You can learn more about our free plan over at rss. com. Like I said, my name is Joe Cassabona. I'm the evangelist here at rss. com and I think that this is the best hosting for most people. You get a ton of features completely for free, worry-f free. And when you are ready to upgrade to get bigger features or more advanced analytics will be there for you, too. When I first started podcasting a little more than 10 years ago, YouTube and Spotify were not in the game. Video wasn't even a consideration. We used Skype basically to record our calls and ecam call recorder if you remember that. And the difference between a ad in a podcast was pre-roll, midroll or post roll, not where and when and how long and if it was going to be baked in or dynamic. All of those things have changed. Podcasting is evolving quickly and that can feel really complicated both to longtime podcasters like myself as well as new podcasters who are trying to get into the game. And so when it comes to podcast hosting, you want your podcast platform to evolve with the industry and to be easy to understand. And that's what I want to talk about today as we compare RSS. com with Libson. Hey everybody, my name is Joe Cassapona. I am the evangelist and content creator here at RSS. com. And as I just said, I've been podcasting for a very long time, almost 15 years if I'm counting correctly. And a lot has changed in that time. I have used a ton of podcast hosts. In fact, Libson was one of the only games in town when I started, and so that is where I hosted my podcast. But a lot has changed since then, and lots of people still ask about Libson. It's been around for a very long time. So, today I want to dive into what exactly Libson has to offer, their features, and their pricing, and when you should choose Libson versus something like RSS. com. Let's dive into it. Okay, so as I mentioned, we really want our podcast platform to do two things. Evolve with us and be easy to understand. And when you have too many choices, you suffer from decision fatigue. And that is really when I was reviewing all of the Libson plans and what they had to offer. Again, when I first started, it was like you pay five bucks, you get 50 megabytes. You pay 15 bucks, you get 150 megabytes. And that was basically it. In reviewing their plans today though, I was a little bit confused. How much do I get? How many hours can I upload? And that can create a problem. You want your podcast platform to be straightforward. So, I'm spoiling it a little bit, but Libson's pricing was a little bit confusing. I do want to talk about the pros and cons first, though. So, some of the pros of Libson, they are a longtime trusted podcast host. Like I said, when I first started, I used Libson for a really long time. Some of the longtime podcasters across the planet use Libson and they trust Libson and they understand that Libson is going to keep their show up. And that's another thing. They have consistent uptime. They can tout very long uptime, very few interruptions. And this is something that more and more hosts can offer. But Libson has been touting this for a very long time. They also have IAB certified stats which means that you can trust that you are getting accurate reporting from them and again this is something that they have been able to tout for a long time and you can monetize with their ad network. They have a pretty big dynamic ads and marketplaces and you can really choose how you want your show to be monetized on that side. They also support Apple podcast subscriptions. So, there are a few ways to monetize your show with Libson. Now, if we look at the cons, their interface is pretty dated. You log in and they've made some changes since I've left, but it still feels like a very old web application. They're also lacking modern features. So, we're going to look at this in a minute, but there's the idea of podcasting 2. 0 and adding modern features to help podcasters even more. This is one of the things at the forefront of evolving podcasting and Libson just doesn't have a lot of those modern features. They also charge based on disk space as well as hours uploaded. So they kind of get you coming and going. And because of that, they have pretty convoluted pricing. Again, I was looking at their pricing and I was struggling to understand the difference between some of the plans even as somebody who is a longtime podcaster. So, those are some of the pros and cons. Let's actually dive into the particulars of Libson and the pricing plan. Okay, so here's Libson's website. You can see that there are a lot of popular folks hosting with Libson. Daniel Tosh is a popular comedian. The Rich Dad Poor Dad Radio Show. Lore is a longtime podcast. And so, a lot of people do host with and trust Libson. And like I said, they offer podcast monetization. They offer social promotion and have some interesting audience insights. And of course, they make it really easy to distribute in various places because they've been around for a long time. They do have a lot of integrations with a lot of different services. If we go to the pricing page, you can see that you do get a 30-day free trial. When I signed up for this, I still had to put in a credit card, which made me a little bit uncomfortable cuz the button said, "Pay now. " And then in really tiny

text, it said, "If you're new, you get 30 free days. " So again, I wasn't super sure like if I was about to get charged or not. I didn't, as far as I can tell. And then they have four plans, right? Basic, advanced, max, and then the $8 bare essentials plan. So they don't really tell you what is on the bare essentials plan. And if you click this, you actually get taken to a login page. They don't have a page where they show you what is included in the plan. I actually had to Google to find a comparison of the plan names. And you could see, again, this is really complicated and convoluted. So, with the Bear Essentials plans, it's $8 a month. I get 162 megabytes of monthly storage and 3 hours of new content. So, you know, monthly storage implies that this resets, and I guess this also implies the same. For stats, you get a snapshot on the dash dashboard, and you get basic social promotion. For $4 more, you get the same amount of space and some basic stats. And then at $20, you get about double the storage. I guess exactly double the storage and double the monthly hours of content. Again, they don't really make clear like hours are based on the upload of 128 bit rate file. So now I need to worry about how long my episodes are and if I'm exporting them the right way and if I really want to have a highfidelity episode, does that mean that I'm going to hit my storage before I hit my monthly hours of new content? And then the advanced analytics you don't get until you start paying at least $25 a month, but you're still limited by the space and the number of hours of new content. So, if you are starting out, this can feel really confusing. What if I want to have a weekly hourly show? I'm already bumped up to the $20 a month plan. What if I don't really know the difference between 162 megabytes and 124 megabytes? Like, does that equal 3 hours of content? Is that parody? What is the different like what is a snapshot? Right? So, I have to read what a snapshot is for me to understand what kind of analytics I'm getting. And for $4 more, I'm getting more, but I'm not really sure how much more. So, that's all really confusing and convoluted for a firsttime podcaster. And again, even for a longtime podcaster like me, like I don't really know what the average size of my halfhour long episodes is from a file standpoint. So, at least with Buzzrout, you know, like, oh, this is an hour-ong episode. On the three-hour a month plan, I can upload two more hourong episodes or I have two hours left. With Libson, it's even a little bit more convoluted because now you have to do the time end space math, and that's just not that's not something that a podcaster should have to worry about. They also don't really like they have this nifty list of features, but again, this is a very unclear pricing page. So, Libson has been around for a long time and they've offered reliable hosting for a long time, but if you're signing up today or you're thinking about switching, you don't really know what you're getting. like the pricing doesn't seem different enough to me or I'm not really sure what I'm getting unless I really dive into the features and sign up for account which means I have to put in my credit card to see what I get and that is less than ideal and they do have a lot of nice features here podcast ads and things like that but it's tough if you are unclear about what you're getting which is why at rss. com we try to make this as clear as possible we have an actual free plan with unlimited episodes and unlimited storage. And if you go to our pricing page, we make it as clear as possible. We have three pricing levels and we list all of the features you get under each one. And for our free, local, and niche plan, you get unlimited episodes, unlimited audio, you get your public RSS feed and an embedible player. You get basic analytics and we make this clear. Basic analytics with 30 days of insights. We will distribute this to all of the directories and we make it incredibly easy to get your podcast in as many directories as possible. If they have an automatic process, we offer that and if not, we give you step-by-step directions for submitting your podcast to each directory. And we have modern features like keeping your email private, the pod roll, and things that you would come to expect from a podcast host in 2026. Now, if you do want to look at the paid plan, we make it as clear as possible. You get everything in the local podcaster plan, plus we make it really easy to make money with our paid feature. That's programmatic ads inserted dynamically. We allow you to make money with Apple podcast subscriptions, audio to video conversion, and so much more, including AI generated transcripts, and advanced analytics that give you some of the most granular data that I've ever seen in podcast analytics. Finally, if you want to upgrade to our biggest plan, you get unlimited podcasts, team members, a year's worth of analytics, and API access. So, we have you covered. It's really clear, right? Start for free. Get your show up and running. When you're ready to make money or you want to have that YouTube presence, it's very obvious when you should upgrade. And then when you need even more, when you're starting multiple podcasts or you really want API access or long-term analytics, upgrade to the podcast networks plan. The upgrade path is easy and clear. Now, the last thing I want to mention, I've alluded to a little bit, and that's podcasting 2. 0. And so if we take a look at this website podcasting22. org, podcasting 2. 0 is making podcasting better for audiences, podcasters, and developers by offering a new set of features and standards for both podcast hosts and podcast apps. And they do have a sort of ranking of publishing tools here where you can look at the best ways to use podcasting 2. 0 O features and you can see that rss. com is here right at the top in the top eight where we offer lots of features like transcripts, sound bites, chapters to make it easy for your audience to navigate, location and season tags and things like that. So we offer lots of modern features that you can use with your podcast today. If we scroll down to Libson, they're in the bottom 10. They only offer a few. And I'm mentioning this not to say that, you know, you have to have every podcasting 2. 0 feature, but as a host that's been around for a long time, that has supported podcasts and podcasters from the very beginning pretty much, it's important to evolve with your customers, with your audience, to give them the things that they need to survive the podcasting landscape today. And that's something that we really truly care about at rss. com. So I would say when should you use Libson? If you are really looking for that longtime pedigree, like if you are judging a host by how long they've been around, then Libson is going to win most of the time. You know, they also have like enterprise level features. So like this is why you see some big podcasters or big podcast networks with them. So if you need some of those enterprise level features, maybe Libson is the best for you. But if you are an independent podcaster or you are starting a small podcast network and you need really straightforward pricing with very obvious features, a clear upgrade path and modern features to support today's podcasters, rss. com is the best for most people. When it comes to podcast hosting platforms, picking the right one can be hard. There are lots that look similar. There are a few with lacking features. There are some that feels like there are too many features. You really need to know what you're buying. It kind of reminds me of Colia House. Now, if you are not old enough to remember Colombia House, here's how it worked. They would offer you a promo where they would send you 12 CDs. CDs is how we used to listen to music. 12 CDs for one cent. Retail for CDs was anywhere between 10 and $20. So 12 for a cent was a steal. But here's the thing. This was a practice called negative accounting or negative balancing. And what they would do is to get those 12 CDs, you had to agree to buy a certain number of CDs over the next two years. But it's not just that. They would send you CDs every month, and if you didn't return them with a postcard saying that you didn't want them, they would charge you. So, they rained CDs down on you, and if you didn't do your due diligence and send them back, you would get charged, which means that you'd probably have a bunch of CDs that you didn't want, that you didn't realize you were paying for. And how does this relate to podcast hosting? Well, when it comes to hosting your podcast, there are some places that will not offer enough features. There are some that will throw as many features at you as possible to increase the perceived value, and there are some places that will just give you really confusing, seemingly convoluted pricing. And we've been doing a series on this channel for comparing multiple different podcast hosts to RSS. com. Today I want to talk about Podbean. Give you the pros and cons, let you know maybe when you should use Podbean or someone like us over at RSS. com. Hey everybody, my name is Joe Cassabona. I am the evangelist and content creator here at RSS. com. I have been a podcaster

for a very long time and I have tried all sorts of podcast hosting platforms which I think makes me uniquely qualified to talk about the differences in some of these and Podbean you'll see has some legitimately interesting offerings and features that we don't offer at rss. com. So, when should you consider those and when should you use RSS. com or a different competitor? Let's take a look at the pros and cons of Podbean and then we'll actually dive into what some of those features mean. Okay, so the pros of Podbean, they have native video support. This is a big one because not a lot of podcast hosting platforms offer this. They also offer live stream. They have an AI production suite and they have a great mobile app. So, if you're looking for an all-in-one content creation studio where podcasting happens to be a part of that, Podbean may be the place for you. But there are some drawbacks. For example, they have a wide range of plans that is a little bit convoluted, but they also have a hidden free plan. They don't really tell you about this until you sign up, but it's capped at 5 hours total. So, if you're going to do like a shortrun podcast that is 5 hours or less for the entire series, maybe Podbean is really good for that. But for anybody who plans to do this for long term, that is an interesting limitation that they don't make super clear. I had to go looking for that and I only went looking for it because I already knew they had it. So, that's the first thing they have. what some users have referred to as a complicated interface. This makes sense because they have so many features that it's really hard to make a streamlined interface. When you build something for various niches and various feature sets, you're going to get a complicated interface. Many of their most interesting features are at the top tiers only. And the live streaming is convoluted. We'll get into this in a little bit, but the limitations and setup are very confusing. And maybe they're not confusing once you get into it, but like I said with the Columbia House CD thing, you really want to know what you're buying. And having some weird limitations or some weird gotchas around live streaming if live streaming is really important to you as a podcaster is something to keep in mind as you're evaluating some of these hosts. But let's actually take a look at Podbean. Here's their website. So they say from podcast newbie to professional podcaster. And their plans really do reflect this. Their plans and their features do reflect this. They have a lot of features. Everything from podcast hosting features, AI, the ability to repurpose your blog into an engaging podcast. I'd be really curious about that. Studio quality AI voices. So, I mean, I personally have some feelings about that. Video to podcast, so you can convert YouTube playlists into podcast. They have an ads marketplace and a few other ways to make money, the live streaming and then they have a mobile app and then a recording studio all in Podbean itself. Now, if we go to the pricing, we can see they don't make they don't let you really know anything about their free plan here, right? So, the free plan is really meant to get you into the interface to understand it. It's not something that they are advertising as a long-term solution for you. So, their plans start at $12 a month annually. You get up to a gigabyte of uploads per month, and that is audio only. So, they don't support video on all of their plans, only their more expensive plans. And they're doing this thing that a lot of hosts do, which is limit you by the amount of space you upload per month. Now, they do say unlimited total storage, but this is over the lifetime. So, this isn't really a unique feature. All podcast hosts are going to offer this. And then they also offer unmetered bandwidth subject to Podbean's fair use policy. And they give you AI credits. So they'll give you stats, custom podcast site and embedded player ads marketplace. When you go up to the higher plans, you get more credits, more uploads, and then you can support video. They also allow you to have two audio or video podcasts on the unlimited plus plan. And then you move into some of the bigger features like on the network plan you get up to 40 hours of video, unlimited total storage, 3 terabytes monthly. But interestingly, they only meter you on the network plan. You get 6,000 AI credits. You get all the monetization features, team members, and then on the business plan, which is $99 per month if built annually and $129 monthly, you get unlimited private plus two publics. You get unlimited on the network plan. By the way, I didn't mention that. the same amount of storage and it looks like really the main difference between network and business is you get that unlim that unmetered bandwidth and then you do get the private podcasting here as well as single sign on. So this really is for like bigger businesses. They also I love to see this they have the compare plan table so you can kind of see very easily what you get with each plan. So for example, user emerge and intel. This is it. I guess it's listener behavior. This is not something I had seen anywhere else. Analysis on a network level. Obviously that's for the bigger plans. The AI features you get all of them. Those are limited by credit. And then you do get live streaming across all of the plans. So this is really interesting. They offer a lot of features across all of their plans. If you want audio only, you can do that for $12 a month or build annually or 17 a month if build monthly. So, there are a couple of gotchas here. And the first I want to cover is their basic free plan. This is not something that they had on the pricing page. I didn't know it was still available until I created a new account. And then I had to go googling to find this information. But like I said, they give you uh total storage of 5 hours or 500 megabytes and then monthly bandwidth of 100 GB. If you don't know what the bandwidth means, this is not especially helpful. You can upload three episodes per day and a single file limit is 100 megabytes. Your RSS feed only displays the most recent 20 episodes. And then there are a few limitations on the file and specifications. One nice thing is that I didn't have to put my credit card in when I signed up for the plan. So, it is truly free and it didn't make me uncomfortable having to do that, wondering if and when I was going to get charged. So, that's a really good thing. The other gotcha though is with live streaming. This is a really interesting and compelling feature, right? RSS. com supports the live item tag. And so if we do live streaming, if we have our own live streaming server and stuff like that, we can add it to our RSS feed in RSS. com and then it will stream to services that support the live item tag. But this appears to be true live streaming hosted here at Podbean. But if you scroll down to the bottom to the FAQs, there's this question. Is it free to set up? And are there any live streaming limitations? It's totally free to set up your live show. Live streams are limited to 2 hours and 200 listeners to start, but you can earn points to increase these limits, which I didn't see anything about points on the pricing page. If I go to this help document, it seems like they've kind of gified live streaming. And so if I were interested in having a live stream feature with my podcast, with my host, I'd be pretty annoyed at this weird limitation because the article might outline how to get more live streaming with points, but I don't want to have to worry about points if I'm live streaming. So brass tax, when should you use Podbean? I think if you're maybe looking for an all-in-one platform that has the editing and the video support and the live streaming support, no matter how weird it is

maybe Podbean is right for you. But, and I said this the last time I did the Podbean RSS. com comparison, and I said it in my Riverside comparison as well, I get worried when a service that I am using, especially one I'm paying for, loses the thread. And what I mean by that is I like my software to do one thing really well. And Podbean offers a lot of really cool features, but I can't speak to how well they do any of them. The fact that they're touting an all-in-one platform where they are letting you edit and live stream and do video and podcasting makes me wonder where there could be sacrifice. Based on what I've read, that interface could be where the sacrifice is. But these weird limitations can be another place. So if you are really looking for an all-in-one place and you want to try out Podbean, maybe go ahead. It will get it can it seems like it can also get really pricey really quickly though, right? Cuz like 10 hours of video at $29 a month built annually, you can blow past that pretty quickly, especially if you do want to do a lot of live streaming or have a video first podcast. With RSS. com, we may not offer live streaming or the AI editing stuff, but we are really, really focused on creating a great truly free hosting experience for podcasters. So, if we go over to our pricing page, you know, I have been doing a bunch of research on all of these hosting platforms. What I have found in all of these situations is that rss. com's pricing page is the clearest. We let you know upfront exactly what you are getting on each plan. And so for free you are getting unlimited episodes, unlimited audio, the embedible player. You get basic analytics. We let you know right here. Basic analytics, 30 days of insights. We also give you some monetization options even on the free plan. But when you are ready to take that next step, we make it super clear what you get. You get our programmatic ads. You get Apple podcast subscriptions, audiotovideo conversion for YouTube. We'll give you AI generated transcripts. We'll give you advanced analytics. And then when you're ready to go all the way, right, start a podcast network or do some advanced stuff with your show, for less than $20 a month, you'll get unlimited podcasts, unlimited team members, a year's worth of analytics, and then if you are feeling super nerdy, you get API access as well. This also means that you can integrate with other really interesting tools. And so if you want some AI features or you want some editing features, we have partners who tap into our API to let you do that. We don't impose those features upon you. And we don't charge you for those additional features outside of charging access to the API, which is again less than $20 along with everything else you get. So, if you are really looking for this all-in-one one-stop shopping ability to live stream and do video podcasting, Podbean might be right for you. But it looks to me like there are some hidden limitations and it could get really expensive really quickly. And maybe those plans are not for the independent podcaster. Over on rss. com, we start you free unlimited as far as what you upload. And then when you are ready to take the next steps, we make our pricing really clear because we want you to have a good experience and we want to grow with you. Recently, a restaurant opened up near me and everybody who went to it had the same thing to say when I asked what they thought. It was fine, but they don't really do anything well. When you have a restaurant that has a big menu with lots of different types of food, it's really hard to specialize in a particular dish or type of dish. I've seen this happen time and time again with restaurants, stores, small business owners, and online services, and we might be seeing it happen again. Hey everybody, my name's Joe Cassabona. I'm the evangelist and video creator here at RSS. com. And today we are going to take a look at Riverside's new podcast hosting. Who it's for, who it's not for, and how you should decide if it's for you. As a longtime podcaster with a ton of experience using lots of different podcast hosts, I feel like I bring a unique view to what podcasters are looking for and what podcast hosting should have. So, let's dive into it. Okay, so over on riverside. com, you can see their podcast hosting feature. Create and publish your podcast all in one place. This is their promise, right? If you have a paid Riverside account, they will give you free hosting for you to distribute your podcast. Now, a couple things to note is they do offer the uh easy submission to Spotify, YouTube, and Apple podcasts. Uh something that we also offer at rss. com. And they offer some analytics. They want to make it as easy as possible for you to go from editing your podcast or recording and editing your podcast to distributing it. Now, if we look at the dashboard, I've set up a sample show here. I have used it with my client's podcasts, but I'm not using it for any of my own right now. But I do know that you can add an episode title and you can upload a new file or you can choose a Riverside file. The really important thing to remember here is that you can only upload exported files. So, if you are using Riverside, make sure to export before you come over here because you're going to be doing a lot of back and forth. Now, in my experience using this, one thing that did bother me was I couldn't replace the audio or the video after it was scheduled. So, I scheduled an episode for a client. We had a change to make and I couldn't just re-upload the media. I had to delete the episode and then completely read it. Now, I reached out to support about this thinking I surely I missed something. Uh, but it's that is the case. You cannot replace media once it's uploaded, which gives me pause. I'm not really sure why you can't do that. That kind of seems like a weird oversight. Uh, but it is something nonetheless. So, just something to consider that I thought was very strange and we'll get into why in a second. Now, they also tout detailed analytics, but again, their biggest value proposition here is that with Riverside, you can record, you can edit, and you can publish all in one place. I do want to highlight something. When we scroll down to the FAQs, they talk about a few things, but they mention what comes with the analytics. They'll tell you total streams, streams in the past 24 hours and 7 days, top countries, top episodes, streams of each of your last five episodes, and top listening apps. Now, if you are considering launching a podcast or if you have launched a podcast, the data that you get for your podcast is really important. And the data you get from your podcast host is going to paint the best picture of the overall health and growth of your show. So you want as robust analytics as possible for your podcast. Based on what it says on the Riverside site here, I don't think you're getting that. streams in the past 24 hours and seven days makes me think that you're not getting anything after that, which I think is a little strange. Again, I have not used the Riverside hosting long enough to really confirm that, but you would think that they would give you more than that. And if they did, they wouldn't necessarily time limit it to this. So, I think that is a little bit strange. Now, I'm not going to do a shotby-shot comparison of Riverside and RSS. com. We have fully focused on podcast hosting. It is our main and only product and we offer a free version up to a network plan, which I don't think, as far as I can tell, again, you can't host multiple podcasts on Riverid's plans. you that you might be able to on the business side, but we have a ton of features that are all fully focused on creating a good hosting experience for the podcaster for you. We want to make managing your show as easy as possible, which means that we have a ton of features that make it easy to publish your show. We automatically include transcripts. We can send a video version of your audio podcast over to YouTube.

We have deep analytics that go beyond 7 days and that have super granular city and location data. We have a heat map so you can see how popular your podcast is at certain times of the day. We give you guided submission to more than just the top three and you get a website for your podcast. We allow you to embed your podcast on other websites. So if you have a website with a platform like WordPress, for example, you can embed the audio player directly into your WordPress website. And we have monetization features like paid or programmatic ads inserted dynamically. We have a partnership with code adx. You can have Apple podcast subscriptions, donations and funding and value for value. The point is that we are fully focused on solving this one problem really well. And this is exactly why I brought up the analogy I did earlier. Riverside undoubtedly is a great platform for recording your podcast, especially if you want to do a video have guests. Riverside is a great platform for that. It also does a really good job at the editing side of things. I admit that sometimes I will record a solo video episode and upload it to Riverside just to do the editing or to get some of the magic clips. But when you start to focus in too many areas, the overall quality of the product goes down. That is fact. And as a Riverside user myself, I am worried that they start to focus more on the podcast hosting and their core product gets worse. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but I have seen it many times in my career where a company loses focus, they take their eye off the ball, and then they miss. Now, one more thing to consider here is if hosting only comes with the paid account, what happens if you downgrade your account from paid to free on Riverside? According to the AI based chatbot for Riverside support, your podcast will still be available and they have added in settings a way to redirect your podcast away from Riverside. However, they do say that if your account becomes inactive after 120 days, your account and all of its content

including the podcast, will be deleted. So, those are a couple of things to think about if you're going to use Riverside for hosting. Now, who is Riverside's hosting for? It looked like on the page they had a lot of business accounts, right? They had like Marvel and some other really big shows. And there's no pricing for the business plan. They offer content scaling, podcast hosting for unlimited shows here. So maybe you get a few extra things on the business plan that you wouldn't get on any of the other plans. But if you are a pro or live or webinar, like if you are on one of these other plans, then I would say if you really only care about having a one-stop shop where you can record, edit, and publish all from one place, Riverside is for you. If you want the basic elements of most podcast hosts, I do not think you are getting that from Riverside. The analytics are very thin. The uploading an episode, they don't support a lot of features that you want to see. You can't even replace the audio or video once you've scheduled it. So maybe it's because this hosting is in its infancy, but it's missing a lot of things that you would get almost anywhere else. And if cost is a factor for you, rss. com offers a completely free account where you get all of our major features. unlimited episodes, unlimited audio, the embeddible podcast player, a website, you can add transcripts, you get basic analytics, and so much more, all from our free account. So, I would say, yeah, if you're just looking for the very basics and you're maybe you're not sure if your podcast is going to work out and you're just trying things, Riverside hosting is probably okay for you. But if you are serious about launching a podcast, but cost is still a factor, check out RSS. com's free local and niche podcast. You can find it over at rss. com. I think it's really the best of both worlds here. And if you're not using Riverside to record and edit your podcast, it doesn't make sense to pay for it just for the hosting. I would say that there are other tools like SquadCast/descript or a few other tools where you can record and get highquality audio for your podcast and then you could upload it using rss. com. When my wife and I were looking for a house, we noticed something interesting. This one house looked amazing. Beautiful property in a great area. And it was about half the price of similar houses in a similar area. It made us ask the question, what's the catch? Well, the catch was that while it looked amazing from the outside, the inside was a complete disaster. It was what you would call a fixeruppper. And the deal seemed too good to be true because it was true. And that's what I want to talk to you about today. Hey everybody, my name is Joe Cassabona. I'm the evangelist here at RSS. com. And recently, we rolled out a free version of our podcast hosting called the free local and niche plan. This got us thinking about what makes an actually good free podcast hosting plan. The number one free podcast host is Spotify for creators. I always wonder if there's a service that's for free. What's the actual product? How do they actually make money? And that's what we're going to uncover today with Spotify for creators. So, we're going to go over the pros and cons of Spotify for creators. We're going to compare features with RSS. com. And at the end, I am going to go over a few times where it might be a legitimately good reason to try Spotify for creators and when you should go with a different free plan like RSS. com's or a paid podcast host. Let's get into it. Okay, so number one, the pros of Spotify for creators. The first is that it is actually zero dollars. There is no cost to you for using Spotify for creators. At least there's no outgoing cost. You don't have to pay money to use Spotify for creators. They also have monetization options. So, you can make money through their ad platform or their ad distribution platform, for example. They have native support for video. In fact, I've heard that they really prefer when you use video. So, if you want to be video first, Spotify for creators might be an option for you. And they have native engagement features. Engagement for podcasts is really hard because most podcast players don't have some unified built-in engagement. So if someone is listening to your show or watching your video on Spotify, then they can comment, you can make polls available to them, and you can get generally good engagement similar to what you can do on YouTube. So those are the pros for Spotify for creators, but what about the cons? Well, the first is that it's a walled garden. I'll get into this more in a little bit, but when you are on Spotify, they give you every incentive to stay on Spotify and they also make it a little hard to leave Spotify. They have a high threshold for monetization. And to be fair, they have lowered this threshold. It used to be something like 10,000 listen hours, I believe. It's down to 2,000 listen hours. So, it is easier year overyear to make money on Spotify, but that is still a very high threshold for monetization. It means that you can't start a podcast today and be monetized next week. You have to wait because they want to make sure that you, who happens to be their product, is worth monetizing. On top of that, they take an astounding 50% of the ads. That is more than most dynamic ad networks. So, even if you're not selling your own ads, the people who are selling them aren't taking 50%. Most people recognize that it is your content and you're putting in the work and an automated system is serving up ads. So, that is an astounding thing. And then there is the platform dependency. All those cool native features we talked about like native video support and polls and comments only work on Spotify, which means that you need to use Spotify if you want to keep using those, which cuts against the very nature of what makes podcasting so great. And there are, you know, there are going to be people who are like, well, that's it doesn't matter as long as people are consuming my show. and that's fine. But podcasting is one of the last bastions of like an open web where I don't have to worry about somebody just shutting down my account because they don't like this one thing I said or did or it got slightly less enticing to monetize which So I mentioned the walled garden of Spotify, but what does that look like in practice? Well, part of it is that again they're going to try to get you to stay with features. They're going to make it harder to move. They do give you an RSS feed, but they don't make it easy to find that RSS feed. for you to distribute to other platforms. And if you're using video, then their analytics stay squarely on their platform and you're really not getting analytics from other places. But it's even worse than that, right? In March 2025, they deleted a show called The Young God without any reason or warning. The show was gaining popularity. It was showing promise. He hosted the show for 7 years and they deleted it and it was completely wiped off the face of the platform. No RSS feed, completely gone. And so, and this is not an isolated incident. You might remember the last time I made a video like this, I told a similar story about a different podcaster where Spotify, probably some bot, deleted the show and she lost a ton of income. She lost her followers. In her case, they restored the show, but they couldn't restore the lost money. followers. This is the risk you run when you are on a closed platform. And we we've seen this before, right? We have seen social media do this to people, too. We've seen YouTube do it to people, too. Channels getting shut down because of the capricciousness of some automated moderation system. With an open forum like RSS. com or a lot of other podcast hosts, you're not going to run into that. And here's another story about the walled garden where a podcaster or a a company noticed that they were losing $1,000 after switching to Spotify video. This was around the same time last year because when you switch to Spotify for video, they completely replace your audio with the audio from the video. And again, that only is living on the Spotify platform now. So even if you upload a video to an audio only podcast, you're not going to see those stats anywhere else now. You're not going to be able to serve up your dynamic ads. And that was the problem with this story. They opted in to doing Spotify for video without realizing that the audio got replaced. And so they were losing a bunch of listeners. It was an untested program at the time with secretive math as Amanda McLaclin says here. And that is that's ultimately the real problem with a walled garden. It is secret math because the truth is when a platform is completely free, they are going to optimize every way for them to make money on your content. And here's the other thing, right? As someone who's not necessarily a music industry expert, I know enough to understand that the margins of making money off of streaming music is not really great. But when Spotify is making money off of podcasts and they're not paying those podcasters royalties to stream that content, the margins are a lot better. So there are a lot of incentives for them to optimize how they make money with our content. Now, when we look at something like RSS. com, we also have a free plan, but there's a big difference because we make it really clear what you get for free and paid. And for free, you do get unlimited episodes, audio, a public RSS feed. We make it really easy to submit everywhere. You can add transcripts and share episodes. You get a website and an embedible podcast player. You can even start making money on the free plan and we're not taking 50%. In fact, with value for value, people can easily donate to your podcast. So, we give you a lot of opportunities to make money on the free plan. When you're ready and you can upgrade to our $1199 a month plan, as in $11. 99, we make it really clear what you get. You can start making money from dynamic ads with as little as 10 downloads. Not 2,000 listen hours, not any number of subscribers, 10 downloads just to show that you're a we want to know that you're a real person and you're not trying to game the system. But the ver the barrier is as low as it could possibly be. You can also earn with Apple podcast subscription. We do audio to video conversion. So we will take your audio and convert it into something that can be consumed on YouTube and advanced analytics is the big one right. So with the free plan you get basic analytics with 90 days of insight. We feel that is enough for when you are finding your sea legs and trying to figure out what's working and not working for your podcast and when you are ready to take it to the next level. You get advanced analytics on a longer time scale with even deeper insights. So, we make it super clear. When someone visits the rss. com pricing page and they see the free plan, there's no asking what's the catch. There's no wondering if your plan is free, how do you make money? We put it all out there and show you how we intend to make money. We want as many people to get started as easily as possible. We don't want to take money out of your pocket because it is your content and when you are ready to upgrade for more advanced features. That's how we make our money. So after all of that, when should you use Spotify for creators versus a different free podcast plan like rss. com? I would say if you want to be a video first podcaster or Spotify platform influencer, right? If you want to be known as a Spotify person, Spotify is the way to go. But because companies like us at rss. com are rolling out actually free plans. As far as I know, RSS. com is the only one that offers unlimited episodes and unlimited audio without the catch of a walled garden. Because we've done this, I struggle to recommend Spotify for creators the more I read about it because at the end of the day, they are optimizing for how they're going to make money. And we at rss. com are optimizing for how can we make podcasting as easy as possible for as many people as possible. All right, so what did we learn with all of these comparisons? Well, there are a few things that jumped out at me that apply to several of these hosting platforms. The first is confusing pricing models. Many of the hosts use convoluted pricing that make it difficult to understand the total cost. Some platforms even charged based on like a combo of disk space and hours uploaded which required I think I said time and space math and even if there wasn't that time and space math there was nickel and dimeming right useful features were hidden behind add-ons or higher tier plans right AI editing was one transcripts was another private podcasts a pretty common one that got hidden behind higher pay walls and that led to a feeling of being constantly charged for extras, things that should be free. The other thing, and maybe this is the most common, is the storage and bandwidth limits. Most hosting platforms impose strict limits on how much content you can upload per month or total storage, which could be restrictive for growing shows. In the most possibly arbitrary versions, we saw a limit on the number of hours you could upload each month, which you know, I could upload a 5minute clip that is completely uncompressed and that'll be bigger than an hourong very compressed piece of audio. So, that just seems very arbitrary. And even if there weren't necessarily pricing issues, which I think in a lot of the plans, they were very confusing. There were walled gardens, right? Spotify for creators is the biggest offender here, right? Features that only worked within their own ecosystem, making it difficult to distribute your show or maintain ownership. And that led to some hidden risks, right, where Spotify could possibly cut off your funding or you could lose funding with some of the other platforms. Uh some will take a big portion of your ad revenue more than is common or just delete episodes seemingly without warning or just delete episodes, right? Like, yes, I get that hosting is possibly something that you should pay for, but if you're going to tell me, "Hey, I'm going to delete your episodes after 90 days. That's not really a a free plan, right? That's a threemon that's a generous free trial. " So, what did we learn at the end of this journey? It confirmed my suspicions that RSS. com is the best choice for most podcasters. Yes, if you need some very specific or niche feature, if you are some sort of enterprise, maybe there is a better host for you. In my experience, RSS. And there's a bunch of reasons why, right? The truly free starting point. Our free and local niche plan is actually free. unlimited episodes, unlimited audio without the catch of it gets deleted after a certain amount of time or you can only upload a certain number of hours each month. Our pricing is the clearest I've seen. We use a clear upgrade path. We let you know when something is paid. We offer fixed monthly or annual rates. And we don't have a bunch of add-ons. So, if you are if you need something and you're paying for our highest plan, which is still less than 20 bucks a month, if you pay annually, you get everything we have to offer. We also don't offer arbitrary limits based on space or hours uploaded. We offer a lot of modern features like AI generated transcripts for free on any of our paid plans, audio to video conversion for YouTube, which is included on any of our paid plans, advanced analytics. There's also a low barrier to monetization. You can start earning through our paid program, programmatic ads inserted dynamically with as few as 10 downloads. And then podcasting 2. 0, we support a bunch of those features. Value for value, the donation button, chapters, the local tag, transcripts, things that will improve your listener's experience. And then finally, you can trust that your data is safe with us. If you aren't on a paid plan and you want to take a pause, let us know. We're not just going to delete your data. So, that's it for this video. I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions about rss. com or any of the hosting platforms we cover in this video, let us know in the comments below. And if you want to start your podcast, you can do it for free, actual free at rss. com. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, I'll see you out