UFW Podcasts is now available in beta. The Free plan includes one podcast, unlimited episodes, 1 GB of cloud storage, and 10 GB of delivery bandwidth.
There is no paid plan available today. The beta is a useful, working version of the product rather than a preview of a checkout page: you can create a show, upload and process audio, manage its feed, publish episodes, and inspect how those episodes are delivered.
Open UFW Podcasts to create your first show.
A complete home for one show#
Podcast hosting begins with an RSS feed, but operating a show involves much more than producing XML. Artwork changes. Episode descriptions need corrections. A release has to move from draft to scheduled to published without appearing early. Audio processing fails occasionally and should be recoverable. A feed can remain technically downloadable while carrying incomplete directory metadata.
UFW Podcasts brings those jobs into one show workspace. The Free plan is deliberately centered on a single podcast, with no episode limit. It is suitable for an independent creator starting a show, an existing producer testing a new hosting workflow, or a team publishing one focused series.
When you create a podcast, UFW creates its managed feed immediately. You can then complete the information expected by podcast directories:
- title, description, author, language, and explicit-content status;
- category and subcategory;
- episodic or serial show type;
- copyright and owner contact details;
- square show artwork;
- optional inclusion in UFW’s public creator directory.
The feed is versioned as the show changes. UFW serves the latest revision with an ETag and last-modified date, allowing directories and clients to avoid downloading an unchanged document while still receiving updates promptly.
Episodes without an artificial count#
Free includes unlimited episodes. An episode can carry a description, author, season, episode number, explicit-content setting, and an episode type such as full, trailer, or bonus.
Audio masters upload directly to object storage through a short-lived upload URL. The large file does not pass through the account application, which keeps the upload path separate from ordinary API traffic. Once the upload completes, UFW queues processing and follows the episode through uploading, processing, ready, scheduled, published, or failed states.
The current audio pipeline produces a consistent MP3 delivery file, normalizes loudness toward podcast playback, records its duration and size, and updates the managed feed. Processing happens outside the web request. If a job fails, it can be retried without recreating the episode or losing its metadata.
An uploaded episode remains private until you decide to release it. You can publish it immediately, schedule it for a future time, unpublish it, edit its details, or replace work that did not process correctly. For larger catalogs, the episode workspace supports search, filtering by state and season, and actions across multiple selected episodes.
Seasons and release operations#
Serialized shows need structure that survives outside the dashboard. UFW lets you create seasons with their own number, title, and description, then assign episodes to them. Season and episode numbers are written into the podcast feed using the corresponding podcast metadata, so the organization a producer sees is also available to listening applications.
Scheduling is part of the episode state rather than a note attached to a draft. A scheduled episode stays unpublished until its release time. When it becomes public, UFW rebuilds the feed so the release and the feed revision move together.
Publishing controls remain reversible. Unpublishing removes an episode from the public catalog while retaining its working record. Deleting an episode or show also starts cleanup of the associated stored media rather than leaving uploads behind indefinitely.
A feed you can inspect#
A feed can be valid XML and still be unready for a directory. UFW includes a feed validation view that checks both transport and content. It verifies that the public feed can be downloaded, that its RSS structure can be parsed, and that important show fields are present. Once an episode is published, validation also checks the newest item for its description, author, link, and audio enclosure.
This makes feed readiness visible before a directory turns an omission into a rejection. The feed remains a normal public RSS endpoint rather than a proprietary export, so the show can be submitted to podcast applications and read by standards-compatible clients.
Creators who choose public discovery can also expose a show through UFW’s podcast directory. Only active shows with a published episode appear there, and discovery includes the public feed rather than replacing it.
Delivery observability#
Download totals alone rarely explain what happened to a release. UFW records a small set of operational signals for the show and for individual episodes:
- eligible plays after duplicate and bot filtering;
- distinct listeners, counted by privacy-preserving device identifiers per day;
- full and partial media requests;
- bytes delivered;
- listening countries and client applications.
The observability view supports 7-, 30-, and 90-day windows. It plots each signal over time, compares recent activity with the preceding part of the selected window, and ranks episodes by their delivery results. You can narrow the same view to one episode when investigating a release.
These numbers are intended to describe delivery honestly. A request is not automatically called a listener, and transferred bytes are not automatically called a completed play. Keeping the signals separate makes the dashboard more useful when something changes.
What Free includes#
During the beta, every Free account receives:
- One podcast with unlimited episodes
- 1 GB of cloud storage for podcast media
- 10 GB of delivery bandwidth
- Managed, revisioned RSS hosting
- Show artwork and directory metadata
- Seasons and episode numbering
- Direct audio uploads and processing
- Draft, immediate, and scheduled publishing
- Feed validation
- Show-level and episode-level observability
The storage and bandwidth limits are hard allowances. The billing view shows current use against each allowance, and delivery pauses if its available bandwidth is exhausted. There are no surprise overage charges on Free.
Paid access is not available at this stage. UFW Podcasts Plus is being developed separately, but the beta does not require a trial, a card, or a future purchase commitment. We want the Free product to be useful on its own while the hosting and release workflow is tested with real shows.
Start with the next episode#
The beta is open now through the UFW account portal. Create a show, add its artwork and directory details, upload an episode, and validate the feed before submitting it to listening platforms.
One podcast is enough to learn whether a host respects the work around a release. Unlimited episodes are enough to keep publishing.