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Fully Managed Castopod
as a Service

Deploy Castopod as a fully managed service starting at €9/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, support and monitoring included.

Castopod is an open-source podcast host — federated, RSS-first, and built on the Podcasting 2.0 namespace — combining the reach of a mainstream host with the control of self-hosted infrastructure.

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA  No credit card  Cancel anytime

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA
No credit card  Cancel anytime

Castopod

Castopod

STARTING AT

€9/month
Automated Backups
Monitoring
Automated Updates
Auto SSL

USAGE

Unlimited
Human Support
Custom Domains
Terminal Access
File Manager Access
Deploy in your region 21 locations worldwide
GermanyFinlandNetherlandsUKSwedenUnited StatesCanadaSingaporeJapanAustraliaBrazilSouth Africa+9 more →
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ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is Castopod

Castopod is an open-source podcast host built around open standards — a validated RSS feed, the Podcasting 2.0 namespace, and native ActivityPub federation — so your show stays yours rather than living inside one platform's app.

Castopod is published under the GNU AGPL v3 licence and maintained by Ad Aures, the French company behind it, led by founder Benjamin Bellamy. It is built on CodeIgniter 4, a small-footprint PHP framework, and its first stable 1.0 release landed on 18 October 2022 after more than two years of development.

What makes Castopod distinct is that each podcast is itself an ActivityPub actor: listeners on Mastodon, Pleroma, or Pixelfed can follow a show and reply to episodes directly. It carries the full Podcasting 2.0 toolset — transcripts, chapters, persons, and Value-4-Value streaming — and its socialInteract tag was written by Castopod's own maintainer. Built-in analytics follow the IABv2 guidelines and are anonymised at the source. The project reached 1,000 active podcasts and over 43,000 published episodes in 2025, and was funded through NLnet's NGI0 programme.

FEATURES

What Castopod does

Castopod is a full podcast platform, not just a feed generator: hosting, a public site, federation, modern podcast tags, and audience analytics in one open-source application. These are the app's own capabilities — separate from the platform work DANIAN handles.

ActivityPub federation

Each podcast is an ActivityPub actor with a WebFinger endpoint, so people can follow and reply from Mastodon, Pleroma, or Pixelfed.

Built-in IABv2 analytics

Anonymised download analytics that follow the IABv2 standard, with no third-party tracker required, shown per episode.

Value-4-Value

The value tag carries your Lightning wallet and split percentages, so listeners stream sats from apps like Fountain and Podverse.

Multiple podcasts per instance

Run as many shows, episodes, and users as your resources allow on one instance, with no per-show pricing.

Podcasting 2.0 tags

GUID, locked, transcripts, funding, chapters, location, persons, soundbites, and value are all supported across your episodes.

Standard RSS with WebSub

A validated RSS feed plus a WebSub server that pushes new episodes to subscribed apps in near real-time.

Video clips and soundbites

FFmpeg generates short social clips and soundbites from your episodes for sharing — no separate editing tool needed.

Custom domain and public site

Your own domain serves both the feed and a public podcast website, with HTTPS that federation requires.

WHAT'S ALWAYS INCLUDED

Every app. Fully managed.
Nothing extra to pay for.

Every app you deploy includes the full managed service — security, backups, updates, and support from day one.

Automatic updates and patches

Apps run the latest stable version. Security patches applied silently, with rollback if needed.

Daily off-site backups

Multiple daily backups in redundant off-site locations. One-click restore if anything goes wrong.

24/7 uptime monitoring

Continuous monitoring with instant alerting. We respond before you notice.

SSL, firewall, DDoS protection

Auto-renewing SSL, hardened firewall rules, DDoS mitigation on every deployment.

Performance and scaling

We monitor resource usage continuously. When your app needs more headroom, we flag it and upgrade with your explicit approval.

Dedicated engineering support

Real engineers on chat. DNS, SMTP & migration help. All included in €9.

WHY MANAGED

Why teams pick managed Castopod

When Spotify rebranded to Spotify for Creators in November 2024 and tightened its Partner Program through January 2026, the open RSS pipeline lost ground inside the app. Podcasters who want to own their feed are moving to Castopod — and most don't want to run it themselves.

Running Castopod yourself is more than installing it. The work that "just running it" doesn't include is the work that keeps a podcast alive: daily off-site backups, TLS renewal that federation depends on, version upgrades and database migrations, monitoring, and the background task runner. That last one is where self-hosters get hurt. Castopod drives federation, scheduled publishing, RSS import, WebSub push, and video clips through a single command, spark tasks:run, that has to fire every minute.

When that cron stalls, nothing in the admin UI looks broken — but episodes never reach Mastodon followers and don't publish on time. Castopod's own issue tracker documents activities posting at seemingly random intervals when the runner lags, and the project shipped a one-line installer partly because so many people wired the cron wrong.

We also tune what the default install gets wrong for production. Castopod accepts audio files up to 512 MB per episode, but a stock reverse proxy caps uploads at 1 MB and PHP ships with 8 MB limits — so a long interview fails to upload until someone fixes five separate settings.

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

Successful businesses and professionals around the world rely on DANIAN every day

USE CASES

Three teams who run Castopod on DANIAN

These are representative team types we set up most often. Each starts with the same flat €9 plan.

INDEPENDENT PODCASTER

Leaving Spotify after the rebrand killed her IAB numbers

A true-crime show at ~75K downloads/month moves off Spotify for Creators. US region, custom feed domain, federation on so listeners follow from Mastodon, chapters and transcripts on every episode, ~180 episodes imported with GUIDs preserved and a 4-week 301 redirect.

TWO-PERSON NETWORK

Four weekly shows that used to cost $98 across two hosts

Tech, business, gaming, and books — ~120K combined downloads. One instance in their chosen region, per-show custom domains, federation on three shows and off the B2B sponsor-read show, Value-4-Value on two, Redis cache and a CDN-backed media base URL.

UNIVERSITY RADIO STATION

Twelve feeds with mandatory transcripts for compliance

A J-school station at ~300K monthly downloads. Institutional .edu subdomain, transcripts on every episode for WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508, persons tags for credits, federation to the station's Mastodon, quarterly IABv2 exports for funders, SSO via SAML.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run Castopod

There are four honest paths to a production podcast. The proprietary route meters your downloads, self-hosting adds real operations time, a home server hides its true cost in power and uplink, and managed Castopod stays flat. Here's the math at low, mid, and high usage.

 PATH~2K DOWNLOADS/MO~50K DOWNLOADS/MO~200K DOWNLOADS/MONOTES
Proprietary SaaS host
$19/mo$39–49/mo$99/mo+Buzzsprout, Transistor, Captivate price by upload hours or monthly downloads; the bill climbs as your audience grows, and Spotify's free tier trades the open feed for its walled garden.
Self-host on a VPS
~$44/mo + time~$44/mo + time+ tuning at scaleA $24/mo production-class VPS plus backup and monitoring, then 1–2 hrs/month wiring the spark cron, TLS, and upgrades. Add object storage and DB tuning as downloads rise.
Home server
€210–667/mo*€210–667/mo*€210–667/mo*A Synology DS923+ or HP ProLiant ML30, amortised, plus electricity, a business uplink with a static IP, off-site backup, and your own on-call time. *Effective cost including time.
DANIAN Managed Castopod€9/mo€9/mo€9/moFlat, regardless of downloads or number of shows. Cron, uploads, federation, backups, and updates handled. Zero hours of your operations time.

BY INDUSTRY

Castopod for specific industries

Podcasting puts different demands on different fields: newsrooms answer to ad-measurement standards, public bodies to accessibility law, creators to a shifting monetisation model, and nonprofits to data-protection rules. Four industries where the configuration genuinely differs.

Ad buyers verify download counts against the IAB Tech Lab Podcast Measurement Guidelines v2.2, and Castopod's analytics target IABv2. We enable them by default and can toggle the OP3 open prefix per podcast for an independent audit.

A newsroom can publish a 06:00 breaking-news episode with an SRT transcript and reporter credits in persons tags, federating to Mastodon and the feed within minutes. The dashboard reports daily totals with device, platform, and location breakdowns over the 28-day window buyers expect.
Public-body podcasts effectively must meet WCAG 2.1 AA and accessibility law such as Section 508 in the US, which makes transcripts mandatory. We pre-enable the transcript and chapters tags and wire the spark cron so FFmpeg video-clip generation actually runs overnight.

A guest-lecture episode can be uploaded with an SRT transcript, chapter markers at the Q&A boundary, and a 60-second subtitled clip generated automatically. Castopod writes JSON chapters that Apple Podcasts and Fountain read natively, so a 60-minute lecture with eight chapters is fully navigable in those apps.
As creators react to the Spotify Partner Program's revenue split, the Podcasting 2.0 value tag and Lightning streaming sats matter more. We pre-configure the value tag with your Lightning wallet and split percentages, expose the funding tag for membership links, and enable federation so listeners comment from any Mastodon account.

A listener can stream sats from Fountain or Podverse, with most routing to your wallet and a defined split to guests. A 30K-download show pays a proprietary host around $19/month and gives up flexibility; on managed Castopod you keep the full Value-4-Value flow with no middleman.
Nonprofits often need listener analytics that don't track individuals. Castopod's IABv2 analytics are anonymised at the source. We can disable third-party prefix services entirely so only the built-in anonymised stats run, place the instance in the region you choose, and serve audio from a CDN in that region.

An advocacy org can publish a series in English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese — three of Castopod's 30-plus locales — with listeners following from Mastodon and no third-party trackers loaded on the page.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before signing up — answered straight, without sales speak.

Three groups: technical setup, migration, and how DANIAN works as a service.

01

Technical and configuration

Yes. Castopod has spoken ActivityPub since 2021, and each podcast is its own actor with a WebFinger endpoint. Mastodon, Pleroma, and Pixelfed users can follow, reply, favourite, and reshare. We enable federation and run the background queue that broadcasts each new episode, so your followers actually see posts rather than a queue that silently stalls.
Yes — GUID, locked, transcripts, funding, chapters, location, persons, soundbites, and value are all supported. The socialInteract tag was written by Castopod's own maintainer, with Castopod as the reference implementation. We confirm the tags you need are populated and valid before your feed goes to Apple and Spotify.
Yes. Castopod's analytics follow the IABv2 guidelines and are anonymised at the source. There is a known trap where, behind a misconfigured reverse proxy, every download logs as localhost and your numbers break. We set the forwarded headers correctly so the proxy passes the real client address, which keeps your download counts honest from day one.
Castopod does not transcode your audio. Your MP3 or M4A is delivered as uploaded, with ID3 tags written automatically. It does generate video clips and soundbites using FFmpeg, version 4.1.8 or newer. We install FFmpeg and keep it on the path, so the Video Clips feature is available rather than silently missing.
Castopod accepts MP3 or M4A files up to 512 MB per episode. A default LAMP install caps uploads far lower — the common reverse-proxy default is 1 MB, and PHP ships with 8 MB upload limits. We pre-set the proxy body size and the PHP upload, post, memory, and execution limits to the 512 MB values Castopod expects, so a long-form interview uploads on the first try.
Yes. Castopod lets you manage as many podcasts, episodes, and users as you want on one instance, with no per-show pricing and no architectural cap — the only limit is server resources. A small network can run four or twelve shows on the same instance, each with its own custom domain and federation setting.
Yes. Castopod's app and media base URLs both accept a custom domain, and HTTPS is required for federation to function at all. We point the domain, issue and renew the certificate, and keep TLS in place so ActivityPub keeps working rather than breaking on an expired certificate.
Castopod produces a standard, validated RSS feed. You submit that feed once to Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Creators, and Castopod's built-in WebSub server then notifies subscribed apps of new episodes in near real-time — as long as the spark cron is alive to send the pings, which is part of what we monitor.

02

Migration and onboarding

We can activate your app on your own custom domain/subdomain. Examples: mydomain.com, anyword.mydomain.com.
Or, on our randomized free subdomain. Example: 963.apps.danian.cloud
If you wish to use a custom domain/subdomain, select that option when ordering your app (or notify us later). We will send you the required DNS records and if needed, our tech team will modify them for you.
21 datacenter locations across six continents. You choose the region at provisioning. Application data sits in the region you choose; pick whichever is closest to your users or matches your data-residency preference.
Yes. Request a region migration from the dashboard and we run the move in the background. The system emails you when the migration completes; total transfer time depends on data volume but typical instances finish in a few hours. There is no extra charge for a region change.
Yes. Full data export is available at any time, in a portable format you can bring to any infrastructure.
Castopod imports your existing feed by URL, preserving episode GUIDs. You need to import into Castopod, set a 301 redirect at the old host with the new-feed-url tag, and keep both feeds reachable for at least four weeks per Apple's guidance. Because the import runs inside the spark background loop, a reliable cron is essential.
Yes. Apple's own guidance is to keep the original episode GUIDs unchanged during a feed move, and Castopod's import preserves them.
Yes. An archive of several hundred or more episodes imports through the same RSS wizard.
Yes. Castopod supports multiple users with roles, so producers and contracted editors get the access they need without sharing one login. If needed, we can set the initial accounts and roles during onboarding and adjust them whenever your team changes.

03

Billing, support, and platform

€9 covers everything we do for that app: hardware in the region you choose, daily off-site backups with one-click restore, automatic security patches and version upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL and firewall, and engineering support on Email/LiveChat. There are no setup fees or hidden line items. For more info see our Pricing page.
If you decide to continue, we charge €9/app/month from day 8. If you don't, the trial ends and you can export your data. No card is required for the trial, and we never auto-charge you without explicit consent.
No. The €9/month is flat regardless of how many users log into your app. Add 5 users or 50; the price doesn't change.
24/7 Live chat and email support, both staffed by engineers who run the systems. We handle DNS configuration, SMTP setup, app integrations, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and migration help. Response time is typically under an hour. There is no tier system — every customer gets the same support.
Yes. Cancel from the dashboard. We don't charge a cancellation fee, we don't lock data, and we will export your data to you on request before deletion. data to you on request before deletion.
Every customer instance is backed up daily to a separate region from the primary. We test restores. You can request a restore at any backup point within the retention window — usually 7 days for daily backups.
Your application data sits in the region you choose at provisioning — 21 datacenter locations across six continents. Account-level data (billing, account email, support ticket history) is processed centrally. Application data region is picked by you, per app.
99.9% uptime SLA on every app, every tenant. Service credits are documented at danian.co/service-level-agreement. The status page is located at status.danian.co.
When your tenant approaches the resource ceiling — the base tier holds 1 vCPU/RAM, 30 GB storage — we notify you. Resource upgrades happen with your explicit consent; we will not upgrade your tenant or charge you without it.
We wait. We don't suspend the app or delete your data on the first failed charge. We email you, you fix the card on file, and we continue.
Invoices can be downloaded from the billing dashboard in PDF the day each charge succeeds. EU VAT is added where applicable and the VAT-reverse-charge regime applies for VAT-registered businesses with a valid number.
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Yes. Every instance comes with a web-based terminal and a file manager in your DANIAN management dashboard. Useful for managing your data and customizations.
Resources scale with your usage. If your app needs more vCPU, RAM, or storage, we add it — and we ask first before any change to your plan. €9 is the floor; resource-heavy workloads may price higher, but you'll always know in advance.
Yes. We have both a Partner program and an Affiliate program available. Anybody can sign up.
No contract. No minimum commitment. Cancel anytime from the dashboard with one click. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card. After the trial converts to paid, you can still cancel at any month without notice or penalty.

DEPLOY IN YOUR REGION

21 datacenter locations on six continents

Pick the region closest to your users.

United States, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Chile, South Africa and more coming soon

Global Reach Map

Try managed Castopod for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.