Issue No. 12 — The independent podcast
A good episode survives a bad edit. It rarely survives a quiet guest, a broken feed or a host that guesses its numbers. Wavelot fixes the last three.
We count a download the way advertisers do: one listener, one episode, one day, bots filtered out. It is a smaller number than some hosts show you, and it is the one sponsors trust.
Why it works
01 Distribution
Connect your show to the major podcast apps once. Wavelot submits the feed, checks each listing every hour and shows you which ones are live, pending review or need attention, so you never learn about a broken listing from a listener.
02 Analytics
Daily downloads per episode, top apps and top countries, counted to the IAB 2.2 standard. Export a clean sponsor report as a PDF or share a live link that updates itself.
03 Transcripts
Every episode gets a speaker-labeled transcript with timestamps, plus chapter markers at topic changes. Listeners can skip to a chapter in their app, and search engines can finally read your show.
Features
Hosting, distribution, stats and money. The parts of podcasting that are not talking into a microphone.
Every upload is normalized to -16 LUFS with a true-peak limit, so a quiet guest and a loud host end up at the same volume.
Publish to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music and the open directories from one valid, fast RSS feed.
IAB-certified counting with bots and duplicate requests filtered out. Break numbers down by episode, app, country and city.
Speaker-labeled transcripts in about two minutes, plus suggested chapter markers you can rename and drag into place.
Mark ad slots once and swap sponsor reads across your whole back catalog. Target by country and set an end date.
Give paying listeners a personal RSS link with bonus and ad-free episodes. Revoke one link without touching the others.
Testimonials
“Downloads dropped 18% when we switched hosts. Then our sponsor said these were the first numbers they believed.”
“Our guests record on laptop mics from three time zones. The leveling makes them sound like they sat in the same room.”
“The supporter feed replaced a clunky membership plugin. 312 listeners pay $5 a month and get the episodes ad-free.”
“Transcripts with chapters got our episodes showing up in search. Organic listens are up about a third since spring.”
Pricing
Pay for upload hours, not for listeners. We never charge you for a show that grows.
One show, publishing every week or two.
1 show · 3 upload hours a month · Loudness leveling · Basic analytics
$12per month
For shows with sponsors or supporters. — Most popular
3 shows · 12 upload hours a month · Transcripts and chapters · IAB analytics · Supporter feeds · Ad insertion
$29per month
For networks and production teams.
Unlimited shows · 40 upload hours a month · Network-wide ad campaigns · Team roles · Priority support
$79per month
Prices in USD, billed monthly. 14-day free trial, no card required. Save two months on yearly billing.
FAQ
Something else? Our support team are podcasters too and usually reply within a few hours.
Yes. Paste your current RSS feed URL and we import every episode, show notes and artwork. You then set a 301 redirect at your old host, and podcast apps follow it automatically. Subscribers keep listening without doing anything.
The length of the audio you publish. A 54-minute episode uses 54 minutes. Hours reset every month, and if you go over we ask you to upgrade rather than silently charging overage fees.
We measure each upload and normalize it to -16 LUFS for stereo (-19 for mono) with a -1 dB true-peak ceiling, the targets most podcast apps expect. You can switch it off per episode, and the original file is always kept.
WAV, MP3, M4A, AAC, FLAC and AIFF up to 2 GB per file. We publish a 128 kbps MP3 by default, which is what most podcast apps expect, and keep your original upload.
To the IAB 2.2 podcast measurement guidelines: repeated requests from the same listener within 24 hours count once, and known bots, crawlers and prefetches are filtered. That is why sponsors accept the numbers.
Each paying listener gets their own private RSS link that works in most podcast apps. You can connect your existing membership platform or sell access directly, and revoke any single link if it gets shared.
Cancel anytime from billing settings. Your feed keeps working until the end of the paid month, and you can export every episode and redirect your feed to a new host, so leaving takes the same five minutes as arriving.