Privacy policy
Podcaster is made and run by Finnan Simon in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Questions about this page go to hello@podcaster.study.
What Podcaster keeps
Your account. The email address you sign in with, the name Google or Apple passes on when you sign in with them, an id from the sign-in service, and the answers you give under Account: the name the hosts use, your level of education, what you study and the language episodes come in. Nothing else about you is asked for.
Your library. The episodes you make and their files: the audio, the cover, the study notes, the practice questions, the script and the transcript. They stay until you delete the episode or the account.
The ledger. The credit on the account and what each episode was charged: top-ups, invite codes and charges.
How far you listened. For each episode in your library: how far into it you got, whether you reached the end, how many times you played it, and when you first and last listened. It shows which ways of making an episode work. There is no other listening history.
An audit trail. A change that moves credit or blocks an account is recorded with who made it and when.
What you tell Podcaster. Your answers to the survey, your rating of Podcaster, what you write when you mark an episode as poor or ask for its credit back, and a log of which mails Podcaster sent you. They belong to the account and go with it.
What was made from a reading. The script, the recorded voices and the study material of an episode are kept apart from your library, so that the same reading asked for in the same way is made once. What is kept carries no name and nothing about who asked for it: the lines that name you are left out. It is used for somebody else only when they bring the same reading themselves, and it is removed when an episode made from it is marked as poor.
What happens to a document you drop in
The file goes to Podcaster's server over an encrypted connection. Its text is read out, the episode and the study material are made from it, and the file is deleted when the job ends, whether it finished, failed or was cancelled. A reading left on the preview sheet without being started ends a day after the preview appeared, and its file is deleted the same way. Podcaster keeps no copy of the reading.
To make the episode, the text of the reading goes to AI models: a writing model for the script, the notes and the questions, a voice model for the recording, and a picture model for the cover. The models in use are made by Google, Anthropic, Mistral AI and Deepgram. Podcaster reaches them through OpenRouter, and reaches Google's voices at Google directly as well. Google, Anthropic, Deepgram and OpenRouter are companies in the United States, Mistral AI is in France; each works under its API terms. They receive the text of the reading, the choices you made for the episode, and the name the hosts use for you, so that the voices can say it. Leave the name empty under Account and they receive none. They receive nothing else about you.
To know which paper a reading is, a DOI printed on it, or its title, authors and year, is looked up at Crossref and doi.org, the public registries of scholarly works. They receive that and nothing else: not the reading, and nothing about you.
Where it is
Podcaster's server is in Germany, rented from Hetzner. The files in your library are in a Cloudflare storage bucket. Accounts and sign-in are handled by Supabase. Payments are handled by Stripe: when you top up, Stripe receives your email address and the amount, and the card or bank details you enter go to Stripe, not to Podcaster. The mail Podcaster sends you, such as a receipt, the note that an episode is ready or that your credit is low, goes out through Resend, which receives your email address and the mail. Each of these keeps what it holds under its own terms and security; Podcaster reaches them over encrypted connections and gives their credentials to no one.
A copy of the database is made every night and kept for thirty days in the same storage bucket, and the changes to it are copied there as they happen, so that an episode or an account can be restored after a fault.
The Mac app keeps a copy of the episodes you have opened on that Mac, so they play without a connection. Signing out of the app removes that copy from the Mac.
Who sees it
You, and whoever runs Podcaster, when that is needed to fix a problem or to answer a question you asked. When a reading stalls or fails, an alert with its title and your name or email address goes to the people running Podcaster, by mail or through the chat service they receive alerts on. They can also read the admin portal through Claude, Anthropic's assistant, which then processes what they look up there.
Podcaster sells none of it, and passes nothing to anyone else except the services named on this page, each for the purpose given here. If you sign in with Google or Apple, they know that you signed in to Podcaster.
Ads
An episode can carry ads. When an ad fits a reading, the preview sheet offers the same episode with a sponsor's three short pieces in it, for less, beside the ordinary one, and you choose. The ad is picked on Podcaster's server from what you study, your level of education and the episode's language. Advertisers receive counts and sums only: how many episodes carried their ad and what that comes to, never who heard it or anything else about you. An episode with an ad has a Go to ad button; pressing it opens the advertiser's site in your browser, which sees that visit as it would any other.
Cookies and tracking
The app and the website set no tracking cookies and run no analytics. The sign-in service keeps a session so that you stay signed in.
Your rights
Everything Podcaster holds about you is visible in the app: the account under Account (Settings in the Mac app), the episodes in the library. You can delete any episode from its menu.
Delete account, under Account in the Account panel (Settings in the Mac app), removes the whole account. Nothing goes for fourteen days, so you can sign in during that time and keep it. After that, any reading still being made is stopped; your sign-in, your library and every file in it are removed; the titles of your readings and everything that says which texts they were are blanked; your survey answers and ratings are deleted, and what you wrote when marking an episode as poor or asking for credit back is emptied; and your row is scrubbed to a number with no email and no name on it. One thing stays: what each episode was charged, against that number, because Dutch tax law requires a business to keep its books for seven years. After those seven years the readings behind them go as well, and the amounts stay only in the business's totals, with nothing that leads back to you.
To receive a copy of what is held about you, or if the app cannot reach the server, write to hello@podcaster.study; it is done within thirty days. Under the General Data Protection Regulation you can also complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Changes
When this page changes, the date below changes with it, and a change that matters to you is announced in the app.
Last changed 26 September 2026.