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

Pocket Casts is being flogged for showing advertisements to legacy users who were promised an ad-free experience. The first reports started to appear in early September in the Pocket Casts support forum and subreddit. The issue is a bug, according to Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Pocket Casts’ parent company Automattic, and will be corrected.

Pocket Casts launched as a purchase-only app in 2010, charging users a one-time download fee of up to $10, depending on the OS and platform. The service later switched to a subscription-based model and made the app available for free in 2019. After backlash from users, the company gave anyone who paid for the web or desktop apps before the pricing changes free lifetime access to Pocket Casts Plus, its ad-free premium subscription service.

The app was acquired by Automattic in 2021, and the Pocket Casts Lifetime memberships were rebranded to “Pocket Casts Champion” in August 2024. A support page says the rebrand would “not change anything about your membership” and makes no mention of introducing ads. Some users on these free lifetime subscriptions are now seeing ads, however, and are being directed to pay the $40 yearly fee for Plus to remove them.

“I just want the adverts gone – I still don’t need the other Plus features,” said one user on the Pocket Casts forum. “This change makes me feel that you’re trying to increase your conversion rate by making the base product worse.”

In the same forum post, a Pocket Casts employee said that the only way to remove the banner ads is to pay for a Plus subscription, and that they were introduced to “sustain the continued work and maintenance of the app.” This conflicts with a statement from Mullenweg, however, who says the ads appearing on lifetime member accounts are a bug, and that the company is working to fix it.

“Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads,” Mullenweg said in a Hacker News thread. “I don’t believe in ‘lifetime’ purchases, and we don’t create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a “Champions” account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal.”

There are only a few thousand lifetime Pocket Casts members, according to Mullenweg, adding that it “seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model.” We have reached out to Pocket Casts for comment.