Summer update
What we've been up to this summer
It’s been a while since our last update.
Between personal time off and family trips, work slowed down. Despite the hiatus, a lot has happened—both good and challenging.
Here’s where things stand.
Note: This post is a summary of our latest podcast episode. If you prefer to listen, get it here.
Growth, trials, and SEO kicking in
The good news is that Metacast has grown.
We added quite a few paying users in just a few weeks, bringing us to 160 paying customers and about 60 trials (up from 15–20). Our conversion rate dipped as traffic scaled—expected, since more casual users are checking us out—but it’s still strong by industry standards.
Monthly active users have crossed 1,100 (up from ~500 earlier this year). Revenue is now about $275 MRR—nothing close to sustainability yet, but at least covers a couple of coffees per day.
The growth is driven by SEO.
After months of investing in SEO optimizations, we’re finally seeing results: 6,000+ visitors from Google in the first week of September alone, plus some early traffic from ChatGPT.
Watching website clicks match new-user signups almost one-to-one has been validating the hypothesis that SEO is a good growth channel.
Bots, bills, and burn
With growth came costs.
Our website now handles millions of requests per day—mostly bot traffic. A surprising amount of it is sophisticated bots, especially from Brazil and Singapore, running real browsers, executing JavaScript and fooling Google Analytics.
They’re not just annoying; they caused a spike in our infrastructure cost, forcing us to re-architect caching and even start paying for Cloudflare Pro (at $25/mo, it’s totally worth it!)
We’re getting about 3M requests from bots per day, which drove our combined Vercel and Google Cloud costs to about $600 last month. That hurts.
On top of that, Google still hasn’t resolved our request to waive a $6,000 bill from July caused by an incident. They haven’t charged us for subsequent months either. It’s a temporary reprieve, but also a sword hanging over our head.
Product Updates
Even with vacations and firefighting, we shipped a few major updates:
Private podcasts — you can now listen to Patreon, Substack and other member-only podcasts in Metacast.
Global speed control — you can set your default playback speed (2x, 3x, 4x if you’re ambitious).
Podcast search in the web app — you can find, listen and share your podcast on desktop in seconds.
Metacast for podcasters
One of our earliest power users wanted to download transcripts for his podcasts, so we spun up a quick MVP that gives podcasters (on a separate paid plan) access to transcripts, chapters, and summaries. It’s still bare-bones with payments via a one-off Stripe link and hardcoded allowlist, but it works.
This also lays the foundation for web app features for authenticated users, which we’re excited about.
Data privacy
This summer, we disabled Google Analytics cookies, so we don’t store any cookies, period. No dark patterns, no vendor lists of 200 companies who do god knows what to your data.
Instead, we have anonymous data for clicks on events that matter and sync them to BigQuery, where we can track things like: “Of visitors landing on podcast pages from Google, how many clicked ‘Download Metacast’?”
It’s clean, lean, and gives us the insights in a way that respects user privacy.
What’s Next
Surviviversary Sale: To celebrate one year of surviving as a bootstrapped indie app, we’ll run a $10/year promo sometime in October. Think of it as our “we made it through the first year” sale.
Playlists: Starting with a “Continue Listening” playlist that syncs across devices (finally!)
Ratings Push: Our App Store and Google Play reviews are excellent (4.9 and 4.6 stars) but too few in number. Expect some gentle nudges in the app.
Creator transcripts on mobile: Today, we only show auto-generated transcripts; next up is supporting creator-provided ones.
And of course, the ongoing background work: cutting infrastructure costs, improving caching, refining onboarding, and keeping the lights on.
Here’s to year two.
How do I try Metacast?
Metacast is available for free on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.