Speaker 1: When I was growing up, my father always told my brothers and me buy cheap, get cheap. The point being that if you shopped on price alone and always bought the lowest priced thing, you would end up getting something that didn't work for you. Maybe it broke. Maybe it didn't offer everything that you needed. Maybe you would end up spending more money on it in the long run, getting it fixed or maintained. When it comes to podcasting, there are a lot of costs. You need to buy the microphone, you need to buy other gear, and you need to buy podcast hosting. And it's easy to go with the free or cheap option for podcast hosting. But you need to weigh the pros and cons between price and value, between price and features. And that's what I want to talk to you about today when we look at the price difference between someone like RSS.com and Libsyn. Hey, everybody. My name's Joe Casabona. I am the product evangelist at RSS.com. And honestly, Libsyn has been around for a long time. It's one of the oldest audio hosts, and it has staying power. It's got clout, but it's starting to show its age. And there are a few things that we want to consider when we look at the pricing of Libsyn when we're considering other options. So let's dive into it and actually look at their podcast hosting packages. Okay, so the first thing that we'll see here is they have a few different prices. They have prices for everyone, really. Starts at $7 per month. You can go up to $15 or $20. And they even have a $5 plan for the bare essentials. That $5 plan can be really tempting. I actually got it when I first started podcasting. But the thing that they don't tell you with the $5 plan, when you click on it, you just go to a signup page, is that you get 50 megabytes of storage per month. So let's just do some quick math here. If we're looking at 50 megabytes per month at the $5 per month plan, about one megabyte is one minute of audio on an MP3. That means that on the $5 a month plan, you won't even get an hour's worth of storage if you use an MP3. Now, if you're doing 10 minute episodes or just about 15, a little less than 15 minutes, then maybe that's fine for you. This is enough for you to test the waters. But if you are having even half hour long episodes, you are not even going to get two at the $5 a month plan. And that's just with MP3s. If you really care about the audio quality and you're uploading these highly encoded wave files where everything sounds perfect, you're looking at about 10 megabytes per minute on a wave file, which means that you'll get five minutes of audio per month. So the $5 a month plan probably isn't going to work if you're doing a weekly podcast or if you're publishing every two weeks. Because again, you're not even getting an hour's worth of audio. Now, if we look at the other plans, the basic plan at $7 a month for just two extra dollars, you get more than triple the storage. They say this is about three hours of new uploads per month. But now we're running into you're still limited based on the amount of time you're podcasting. If you're doing an hour long episode, you're not getting four. You're barely getting 45. And so again, if you're just kind of testing the waters, if you're a beginner or a small podcast and you're doing every other week, maybe this is fine for you. If you are going to need six hours, you're going to need to bump up to the $15 a month plan. But something else to notice is that you get basic stats on every plan except the $20 a month plan. So again, if you are looking to grow your podcast, if you're looking to put serious time and effort into it, Libsyn's going to cost you $20 a month. And the other thing to consider with Libsyn is that yes, they are a longtime podcast hosting company. They have been around. They really understand how to host audio and make the most and they are reliable. But they're starting to show their age because they don't offer the amount of features that other podcast hosting companies do. So if we do a quick comparison over at Podcasting 2.0, Podcasting 2.0 is generally modern tools to help podcasters. You can see that we support a number of Podcasting 2.0 features, transcript, lock so people can't just take your podcast, chapters, soundbite, funding, value for value, location-based information, seasons, episodes, and so much more. We even support the live tag. So over at RSS.com, we're working really hard to keep our feature set updated and modern. If we look at Libsyn's, you can see they support one feature from Podcasting 2.0 and that's locked. At the time of this recording, they are one of the last hosting companies to even add transcripts and that more or less falls in line with iOS 17.4 and transcripts coming to Apple Podcasts automatically. So as you consider your host, it's very tempting to go with the cheapest option or the freest option. But you also want to make sure you're getting the features that will do you, your podcast, and your listeners justice. If we look at the pricing over at RSS.com, you can see that we do have a $5 a month plan, but that is for students and non-governmental organizations. So we want to give students, NGOs, NPOs the best chance at starting and growing a podcast and that's why we give them a special discount. But if you look at our all-in-one podcast hosting, it's $12 a month. You get unlimited episodes, unlimited audio. We're not going to charge you for space or number of hours uploaded. And we have all of those great features we just covered. Audio to video conversion, episode transcripts, advanced analytics at every plan, not just the highest price plan. We allow you to monetize. We give you a great website, episode scheduling and auto submission. We even support Apple Podcast subscriptions and we have a fantastic support. So again, if you are looking for basic hosting, you just want to test the waters and you want to do it affordably, maybe Libsyn's $5 a month plan works for you. But if you are serious about podcasting or you know that you're going to have more than 50 minutes worth of audio in a month, then you should seek other podcast hosts like RSS.com. Thanks so much for watching. Let me know in the comments what's your favorite RSS.com feature and I'll see you next time.