For the first time since Pinecast launched, we’re increasing our prices. I’d like to take a minute to explain the change and how it will affect accounts.

TL;DR: Our Starter plan will go from $5/mo to $10/mo on Feb 29 for new subscriptions only. Existing customers will be unaffected, unless your subscription is canceled. Referral credits will increase from $10 to $20.

History

Pinecast was founded with the philosophy that podcast hosting shouldn’t be expensive. In fact, when I put the first version of Pinecast online in 2015, the only users were me and my friends. Pinecast was designed to be affordable while still turning a profit, which it continues to do today.

Since the first version went online in 2015, Pinecast hasn’t taken any outside funding: unlike some of the other hosts that have come along, we’ve avoided VC money so that we could prioritize meaningful features and great user experiences over “growth at all costs.” Avoiding outside funding has also allowed us to stick to our core principles:

We don’t reserve rights to use your brand or content. You own what you put on Pinecast, period. The files you upload are the files we serve. We don’t re-encode audio at a lower bitrate or insert ads. We respect you as a customer. We don’t track you, we don’t monetize your data, we avoid dark patterns, and we don’t send you spam. You will get top-notch customer support, even if it’s to support you leaving Pinecast. The services we offer to you are built with detail and care in mind. Our analytics, dashboards, and other offerings are accurate and highly optimized for making you productive.

In the last couple years, we released a pricing change that did away with our $50/mo Pro tier and allowed customers to pay for only the features that they wanted. We could have easily added a third intermediate tier with some Pro features, but we instead opted to give our users choice with prorated add-on packages. We did this because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s what will turn the biggest profit.

What changed?

Quite frankly, nothing has changed. In fact, behind the scenes, we’ve worked hard to make Pinecast more efficient. Compared to three years ago, the average podcast requires 70% fewer network and compute resources. Our total operations costs have less than doubled, while the number of active podcasts on Pinecast has grown four-fold.

So why the price increase? While Pinecast has stayed lean, it’s limited our ability to invest in truly ambitious projects. I have a ton of big ideas that I’d love to bring to our users, but the capital to build new infrastructure and experiment with technology to support those ideas is not readily available when you’re optimizing for low costs. We can continue on our current path, but it dramatically limits our ability to make Pinecast an unusually brilliant product for folks who want more than what we offer today.

What does it mean for me?

Prices will increase from $5/mo to $10/mo for any new subscription starting February 29, 2020. If you’re already a customer, your existing subscription will be grandfathered into a legacy pricing plan and you’ll continue paying $5/mo for your Starter subscription indefinitely. There is no time limit for the legacy price.

If your existing subscription is canceled and you re-subscribe, the new subscription will use the new $10 price. We won’t be able to put anyone onto the legacy pricing plan after 2/29.

Coupon codes

If you currently have a Pinecast referral coupon (all paid users can create one from the main dashboard), it’ll continue to work the same way, but with the new price factoring into the referral bonus. Currently, upon the third successful customer invoice for one of your referrals, we’ll credit you two times the value of the referral’s subscription. This means that any users referred after 2/29 will count as $20 (2 × $10) rather than $10 (2 × $5).

What next

First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who has been a Pinecast customer over the years. We have lots of active projects underway (eight ongoing workstreams at the moment!). Some are very visible, while others are behind-the-scenes changes. As the new pricing plan takes effect, we’ll be able to take many of the awesome ideas we’ve had in our Notion “planning” column and move them over to the “in progress” column; please stay tuned to see what sorts of things we’ve got in store!