Pocket Casts, You Altered the Deal, So I Will Alter Your App
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The author of the post modified the Pocket Casts app to remove ads after the company changed its business model, sparking a heated discussion about the ethics of 'lifetime' subscriptions and the costs of maintaining an app.
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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.
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.
You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago. Why can't you instead be happy with all the value you got from the app? We aren't born to be small minded and stingy, look up to greater goals and a greater attitude in life. We only have so many years before it is cut from us.
I mean... that was the agreement between both parties. Really not that hard to grasp.
While the timeline isn't explicitly stated, free refills are implied that it's for the duration of your visit. In fact you can see the implication given that's how it's used most of the time.
Telling someone they'll get "lifetime" access for a one-time payment is not the same.
"Free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee and tea. Starbucks Rewards members may receive free refills of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea during the same day in store visit at participating Starbucks stores (excludes Cold Brew and Nitro Cold Brew, Iced Tea Lemonade, Flavored Iced Tea, and Starbucks Refreshers® base). To be eligible for free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea, your initial order must be served in for-here ware or a clean reusable cup."
They could do what other apps have done and release a new SKU for a new business model or with a new feature set that justifies asking for more money. Reeder has done this, for example.
I think JetBrains has one of the most fair and honest subscription schemes where you pay for a subscription but when you stop paying you’re free to keep using the last major version that released while you were subscribed. I think that’s much harder to do on mobile app stores, though.
But yes I don't think you can disable updates only for particular apps.
If we're doing "but"s...
But the original agreement was for updates for a lifetime. Of course people are going to be upset if they were promised one thing and ended up getting something else.
Why they feel entitled to the thing they paid for is not hard to see. A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support.
This is what I would like to know. Granted, Google makes it hard to be an app developer these days with constant requirements to update things just to stay compatible and compliant with all their requirements. But still - $800k a year is like 4 full time well paid staff. And that was their loss, so add all the revenue to that.
The real answer of course, is they aren't just maintaining the app as is, they are trying to push all sorts of new features into it and this is what's costing them. But why should previous users be paying for that?
I don't know what world that failing to keep your word is OK, but just because an entity is a company doesn't give them a free pass. No matter how good the deal is.
Just on the basis of fair expectations in the marketplace, if you say all you need is a fixed rate to serve me for the rest of time, then that's the deal. Anything short, insolvency or otherwise, is reneging. The mismanagement of the company is not my concern.
And before people hop on and make it sound like people with this expectation are naive for believing a company could offer this lifetime service for that fee, AntennaPod + gPodder.net provide the _exact same service_ for the low price of $0. I gave PocketCasts money, and somehow they turned that into -800K .
I don't know where this mentality that customers owe companies that fall short of their promises grace or understanding come from. When I fall short of my obligations to companies, collection agencies rather than thank you notes usually appear.
If you bought the app only you weren't grandfathered into anything. You needed to have also bought the web player.
I mean, everytime I see someone talking about them on Twitter, they are clearly struggling with _something_.
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.
We may need a law that regulates "lifetime" purchases. One part is standardised disclosure. The other is putting fees into a trust.
The streaming video service Nebula, for example, has a lifetime membership. The company was very straightforward with potential customers: this is not their best deal, it's explicitly meant for people who want to help support the company (or who prefer not to have ongoing subscription costs), and they are doing it as an alternative to seeking outside investment money. The money they raise won't go into a trust, but into expanding the business in the same way a company might if it went to seek venture capital.
At the time I signed up for it, it cost roughly 10 years' worth of subscriptions.
> If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset.
Everyone who bought the app STILL have access to the app. All features they paid for are still available (except if you consider no ad a feature).
The "correct" way to do it is change current app to classic and release a new app but that's quite cumbersome. I would like Apple or Google to offer an option to provide paid upgrade options.
But yes, I do consider no ads to be a feature. My attention is valuable
They promised a thing they could not deliver on and that was sufficient to get enough users that they could then sell the app onwards to a bunch of suckers. This is a classic play in the "sell dollars for pennies and then sell the dollars-for-pennies app to a guy with a lot of dollars who eventually gets sick of buying pennies with dollars" genre.
Lifetime licenses only work in the beginning when you have people buying them at regular intervals, at some point the market is saturated and you need to have a subscription model.
Case in point: Unraid. I have two grandfathered "forever" licenses and I'll never need a third.
By this standard, people should feel entitled to get an update on their fridge whenever a new compressor technology is available (or whatever, you get the point).
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.
We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.
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-...
https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/advertising-and-promotions...
Being told that the app you paid for would be a one-time payment, and then having the service deliberately degraded to try and force you into a subscription model, is clearly not puffery.
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.
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”
So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.
But a life time membership is not an unreasonable promise.
But you’re right, a lifetime membership should really be for a lifetime. But since nobody is suing over it, then it’ll continue to be abused.
1. A few kb of playlists and accounts 2. Probably a search service 3. Likely artwork caching
It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either.
Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot.
And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment.
It's not like pocketcasts is paying the podcasters or producing content.
The problem is seeing every single dumb thing as some kind of mega-growth M&A deal when it's not. No, your podcast app won't make you hundreds of millions, sorry.
I don't know what the original price was and I understand why he is mad, but that was a poor business decision. If you overpromise that's kind of on you, plenty of companies have been burned by such behavior.
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!"
Because they paid for it.
I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.
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 ...
[[ 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 ... ]]
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.
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.
Release Pocket Caste 2 and they’ll complain. Sub and they’ll complain. Don’t update and they’ll complain.
HN is highly sympathetic to the plight of the open source dev who rage quits because people demand too much for free. This is basically the same thing.
I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.
Do you apply the same sort of lazy false equivalence to all moral and ethical questions? People will always complain, therefore you can do anything!
I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates, but I don't have any patience when they take active steps to renege on their promises by adding ads or taking features away - that's just fraud.
When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.
Just because someone says a promise was broken doesn’t make it true.
Who asked for free updates? I repeat:
> I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates
Of course Apple forces devs to update their apps every couple of years to support new minimum SDK requirements.
Well, that statement was half wrong.
Value Added: no
In my opinion, at least, stating something and then adding "I am right!" is rude and disrespectful. It's implying that anybody that disagrees with you is not just wrong, but wrong to the degree that you cannot even allow for the possibility that you are mistaken, or that conversation is pointless. That's why I was rude back.
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.
* Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.
* You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.
* You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)
* Just user confusion in general. They go to reinstall the app, search the App Store "didn't I already buy this? I says I haven't!" The App Store also doesn't give developers any access to customer info so you can only guide these users to the right place in the App Store to find the old version and hope they figure it out.
It's not something that is well supported, but it's not infeasible.
> Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.
Links to the store listing page, yes, but also I wouldn't trust those links to work permanently anyway, I'd create a redirect page in my control.
Deep link connections into apps are evaluated at install time, so if a user installs a new version and the site allows this, that should transition correctly.
> You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.
I would suggest stopping updates. If you're disciplined about software releases you can burn down the list of bugs to the point that it's negligible towards the end of the major version, and then close it as no longer updated. Bugs on new OSes are out of scope, a good reason for users to update.
> You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)
I'm pretty sure I've seen this done via an admittedly awkward use of bundles. Alternatively a soft launch to existing users with temporary discount seems very common.
> Just user confusion in general.
This feels solvable, and it's not like the current situation doesn't result in confusion. We have plenty of confusion, so it's just about figuring out the better option. This will vary by userbase.
I don't personally have the "righteous fury" of the article's author (I'm more just annoyed and disappointed that a nice thing I liked is now noticeably less nice, for complex social and economic reasons outside any one person's control), but I can certainly understand why a person would be mad enough to fork a repo and write a couple hundred words in a blog post.
However instead they took the existing app and vandalised it, abusing the user's privacy and invading their eyeballs.
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.
Most beneficial for me is its customizations that can be applied to all shows or configured for individual shows. For example, all episodes for all shows can be set to play at 1¼x speed, but one show could be set to play at 1x speed. For me, the interview format can be at the faster speed, but the music podcast is better at regular speed. Similarly, users could set all shows' episodes to start at the 30-second mark because of, say, opening ads, but a specific show could be set to start at a different time because its opening is unlike the others.
I listen to enough shows that these configuration options make the app great for me. It's been a long time since I tried alternatives, but none of them ever stuck for more than (at most) a few days because the presentation or lack of customizations were less satisfying or convenient.
Truthfully, just writing this has compelled me to give the developer another in-app tip. It's been years since I did that and I must average at least 20 hours of use a week.
Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.
You get very little extra for the $15/year subscription fee. That’s not a complaint. You get all of the features that most people care about in the Fred version.
It’s available for the iPhones, iPads and the web with full CarPlay support and it syncs podcasts to the Apple Watch.
He did learn from his mistake of making Instapaper a one time payment and sold it.
For those who don’t know, he was the cofounder of Tumblr.
I use it every day. It's smooth, seamless, and FOSS.
Note that I am just a user, and not otherwise linked with them.
[0]: https://antennapod.org
To be fair, in Star Trek you will see them carrying around like 3-4 data tablets, so even our broken enshittified tech works in a way Star Trek future predictors thought would be high tech.
Caveat: I *only* listen to Podcasts on my phone so I don't have to think about syncing library/status between devices.
They do have a few online features they run, like syncing your subscribed podcasts and listening progress and whatnot, and I think they have their own index of RSS links for searching, but nothing compared to streaming audio.
Anyway, as of today they backtracked on showing ads to people who purchased the app before it went free. I guess they're claiming it was a bug, which I don't really believe but I don't care as long as they undid making the app ugly.
The argument on a "lifetime subscription" also does not really apply here. The app was a one-time purchase and then made free somewhere in 2019. Their logic was that early app purchasers would still receive the same set of features when the app was made free and a subscription was introduced. Source https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/lifetime-acce...
Basically, purchasers didn't lose any features in 2019 onwards. The purchase was also for the entire app, not just an ad-free version, as there were no ads to begin with.
I switched over to Spotify. The only gripe I have with Spotify is when my phone encounters a dead spot, Spotify puts up a modal "You're offline" and loses my place in the podcast.
Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.
We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.
The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.
As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.
We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.
Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment here.
I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.
This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.
> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account
This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.
For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.
By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma. The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.
Resolving this wouldn't have been hard, as due to it being open-sourced, we can see there's a debug flag to turn the adverts on and off: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/podcasts-you-altered-the-de...
The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.
Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on. I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.
What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.
My constructive thoughts are: 1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price. Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing. 2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users. 3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze. Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.
I've already reached out to your customer service via email including my account info, so if you could use that to get my account upgraded, I would be very grateful. I received a pretty swift response to my first enquiry, but your customer service representative on that occasion pretty much said "lol sucks to be you, maybe you should upgrade?" I considered this an incredibly unacceptable response, and said as much, again pretty quickly (all three initial emails went through within half an hour). It has been days since my second email and I have not received a reply. If you are, as you say, trying to do right by people now, your customer service does not seem to be on the same page as you.
There are also dozens of users in the same situation as me who have spoken up on Pocket Cast's official forums, and elsewhere on social media. It may be worth getting the customer service representatives on your forums on the same page as you, because so far they have been giving the same "lol, just upgrade" type response that I got in email. And getting someone to extend the same offer to users making the complaint on Reddit and other social media.
Nor do I when I read passive-aggressive replies from Automattic on the Google Play store: "Hi Matthew! If you believe that your one-time payment entitles you to Plus access, which removes the ads, please reach out to us: [URL]. The banner ads help us sustain the app so we can continue making it available for free."
A thread was also pointing out in the google support forums for another app that did the same thing, ignoring a no-ads purchase and forcing a new subscription, and google asked to report the app from the store as this violates their terms of service
This is not true for people, like me, who only bought the Android version. We were not tagged with "Champion", but this was stated: "you’ll still have access to the mobile app features you paid for".
This was in the description of the app at the time:
"There are many more powerful, straight forward features help you make Pocket Casts yours and in case you were wondering, here’s what Pocket Casts DOESN’T have: ads, episode limits, pushy trials, feature bloat or plugins.
It. Just. Works."
Now I have ads, and when I try to dismiss them I am greeted with a pushy sales pitch for a subscription.
Life is too short for this, and I've moved on to another app. But perhaps this is insightful as to why some users are frustrated and upset.
Give me a good 3y or 5y deal, then we're friends.
I am sympathetic with author, but unfortunately it is also one, if not the best podcast app technically. It has this 0-bullshit UI which does what you expect without enforcing some maddening organization patterns (Castro) of fancy UI with hilarious amount of bugs (looking at you, Overcast).
It has the "mark as played" button, also in car play.
It is the only one I've found capable to pull the episode on Apple Watch over network, instead of relying on pre-caching from phone app.
I would be very sad if PocketCasts goes out of business.
P.S.: I checked and it seems that Overcast also has cellular streaming on AW - I need to test it again.
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.
Did I expect free updates and features forever. No, Only the bare minimum to keep it running.
Hell, if it was owned by a small company or an individual I wouldn’t mind donating to keep it maintained once in a while. I don’t feel the need for a subscription for a podcast app. The fanciest feature I’ve used in the past 10 years is the sleep after 15 min options.
Saddest is that they are advertising their own apps. Good to know which one to avoid.
Any Suggestions for iPhone that I can easily move to from pocketcast?
They should be forced to publish a new APK with a different name to change monetization strategies or honor what people paid for. This is fraud and theft.