💎 Premium podcasts: Offer exclusive content to your loyal listeners

Castopod allows you to mix public episodes freely available to anyone with premium content available to some subscribers only.
So you can have, in the same podcast, mostly paid episodes but also some free trailers. You can have a podcast with mostly free episodes but also some paid bonus episodes.
And of course, premium podcasts can be very useful even if you do not want to monetize your podcast: you can grant access to classmates, relatives, co-workers…
The possibilities are endless and the choice is all yours.
Keep in mind that your podcast (and its RSS feed) and all its free content will be available on all platforms to all listeners.

Now let's try this out! 👇️

We will assume we already have a Castopod instance up and running, with a podcast and a published trailer episode:

When we edit our podcast we can choose whether a new episode should be premium by default or not:

Now let's create this brand new episode.

We set it as Premium. 💎
⚠️ Note that you can change your mind: a private episode can be updated and become publicly available at any time. Or the other way. You decide.

And we publish it:

That's it! It is now published. 🏁
A dollar sign “💲” indicates that this is Premium content.

If our Premium content is available upon paid subscription, we can add the link to our favorite payment platform.

On the public website, our listeners will now see two episodes, a free trailer available to everyone and a Premium one which is locked and unavailable to listeners until they get a subscription.

The funding links and the “Subscribe” button will lead your listeners to your payment platform.

But back on the admin panel, we cannot see any Premium subscriber so far. 😭

Let's say we received a payment from our very first subscriber:
In order to create that new subscription, we will type the subscriber's e-mail address and the subscription expiration date (in case there is one, otherwise we will just leave it blank):

We have a subscriber!
⚠️ Note that the number of downloads can be insightful if we suspect that a subscription is wrongfully shared. Should such a case happen, we could generate a new token or even suspend this subscription.

So what happens next for our subscriber?
They will receive an e-mail with a personal token and their individual RSS feed URL.
Each subscriber will receive a different token and a different RSS feed URL that should not be shared.
(Some podcast apps, such as Podcast Addict, even have a "Private Feed" checkbox to ensure that the URL is not shared.)

⚠️ Make sure that E-Mail/SMTP is properly configured. Check Castopod's Email/SMTP setup documentation to get detailed information on how to do that.

The token can be used by the subscriber to unlock all of our website's content:

All episodes are now unlocked and playable. ▶️

The URL feed can be used in any podcast app to subscribe to the private feed. (Here we are using Kasts .)

All episodes are now available and can be listened to, and this works from any podcast app.

The world of exclusive content is now yours to conquer!

📦️ Download Castopod on castopod.org.

Cover photo by cottonbro.