Podbean Reviews & Product Details

I upload several long podcasts every week. Before Podbean, I chose managed my own site. In doing that I had complete freedom in presenting my materials, but it took a lot of my time. I went looking first for a host that offered -unlimited space-, a modest price, great ease and timeliness of uploading, a simple interface, the ability to share to social media sites and a large and ready group of downloaders. Podbean has all of those features plus automatic uploads to the podcast giants like Itunes and Google Podcasts. Podbean has all of these features. I have been on Podbean for nearly a year now and have gained new followers - more than I expected - and my podcast has the potential of being heard all over the world, and very easily at that. OK - Podbean is EASY use and podcasts are Easy for a listener to find. And EASY for a newbie to get started fast and maintain with limited effort. I like all these features.

I do not like the way my podcasts appear. There are a few templates - and though my podcast falls into a major category (82% religion and spirituality), there are no templates that have anything to do with this vastly popular topic. Filling out the template is not WYSIWYG - it can appear to the podcaster one way and to the user another quite differently, especially in the "fill-in sections (fields)" - for me the default text often gets published with a background that obscures the text and/or text and background conflict. I guess I could build my own template; that is what I have done in the past which I wish to avoid. I would also like to be able to set the order of the podcasts, grouping them by subject matter, but there is little I can do about that. Of course, the uploads display in chronological order, but a great feature would be to implement a SQL service so they can be ordered as the author deems appropriate. Finally, the monthly price is a little steep at $29.

Because I usually do 3 - 4 50-minutes shows per week, with Podbean I'm saving loads of time in posting them. That was my biggest problem before, which is now solved. And I'm actually saving a little money by abandoning the prior company I used for this purpose - after 18 years on, that company really did my wrong, and I had to find an alternative fast. In a very short time with little preparation I was able to make the switch.

Absolutely nothing, it's been a miserable experience since the beginning

Everything. I told them I had a lot of content I need to upload and they told me I could do it via FTP. I told them I would need their system to extract the ID3 metadata from files while creating episodes and they ASSURED me that it can. It can't. I spent a lot of time uploading 16gb of files all for nothing. It doesn't read a damn thing and all still have to be manually named. Avoid at all cost. They have since stopped replying to my emails because they got caught lying.

There is no "solving" with these lazy, lying clowns.