Pocket Casts is showing ads to people who paid for an ad-free app

Users who disregard the ads are taken to Pocket Casts’ subscription page.

Pocket Casts is being flogged for showing advertisements to bequest users who were promised an ad-free experience. The archetypal reports started to look successful aboriginal September successful the Pocket Casts support forum and subreddit. The contented is simply a bug, according to Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Pocket Casts’ genitor institution Automattic, and volition beryllium corrected. 

Pocket Casts launched arsenic a purchase-only app successful 2010, charging users a one-time download interest of up to $10, depending connected the OS and platform. The work aboriginal switched to a subscription-based model and made the app disposable for escaped successful 2019. After backlash from users, the institution gave anyone who paid for the web oregon desktop apps earlier the pricing changes free beingness access to Pocket Casts Plus, its ad-free premium subscription service. 

The app was acquired by Automattic successful 2021, and the Pocket Casts Lifetime memberships were rebranded to “Pocket Casts Champion” successful August 2024. A enactment leafage says the rebrand would “not alteration thing astir your membership” and makes nary notation of introducing ads. Some users connected these escaped beingness subscriptions are present seeing ads, however, and are being directed to wage the $40 yearly interest for Plus to region them.

“I conscionable privation the adverts gone – I inactive don’t request the different Plus features,” said one idiosyncratic connected the Pocket Casts forum. “This alteration makes maine consciousness that you’re trying to summation your conversion complaint by making the basal merchandise worse.”

In the aforesaid forum post, a Pocket Casts worker said that the lone mode to region the banner ads is to wage for a Plus subscription, and that they were introduced to “sustain the continued enactment and attraction of the app.” This conflicts with a connection from Mullenweg, however, who says the ads appearing connected beingness subordinate accounts are a bug, and that the institution is moving to hole it.

“Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, adjacent earlier Automattic acquired it, should not spot ads,” Mullenweg said successful a Hacker News thread. “I don’t judge successful ‘lifetime’ purchases, and we don’t make caller ones astatine Automattic, but we person honored the bequest radical who paid a one-time interest to Pocket Casts erstwhile they were a startup with fundamentally what we telephone a “Champions” account, which is simply a beingness you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal.” 

There are lone a fewer 1000 beingness Pocket Casts members, according to Mullenweg, adding that it “seemed amended to effort and marque it much of a acquisition than effort to migrate radical to what is really a sustainable concern model.” We person reached retired to Pocket Casts for comment.