[vorpalhex]

What is PocketCasts maintaining?

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.

[photomatt]

We don't disclose Pocket Casts revenue directly, but we invest $millions a year in its development and hosting. It gets very broad usage and has over ten million of listening hours a week. There are clients maintained and new features developed for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple Watch, Android Phones and Tablets, and an open web version.

[seec]

I don't understand why you went with a single licence valid for all platforms. Clearly each client is a different product on each platform, even if it might have the same core functionality.

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.