Podbean — Basic Free plan
- Free allowance
- 5 hours / 500 MB TOTAL, not monthly: 'Total storage: 5 hours (500MB).
- Verdict
- fails: quotathe free allowance is too small to matter
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- country-phone?placeholder, not evidence; card unknown, phone unknown
- Binding limit
- per-object-capfile size should not exceed 500MB
- Evidence
- reported4 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | 5 hours / 500 MB TOTAL, not monthly: 'Total storage: 5 hours (500MB). Note: Storage does not reset monthly.' Help centre adds: 'The total file size should not exceed 500MB' and 'The total length of the file should not exceed 5 hours' — both accumulate and block further uploads when either is hit. unit MB; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
3 episodes/day; 100 MB single file on Free (3 GB on paid); RSS feed exposes only the most recent 20 episodes on Free; formats on Free are MP3 and M4A only (paid adds ogg/zip/pdf/pptx/docx/xml — note zip is a paid-plan format, so Free cannot take archives at all). |
| Identity | country-phone (inferred, not read) not published |
| Egress | 100 GB per month on Free ('Monthly bandwidth: 100GB'), unmetered beyond that in the sense of no per-GB charge but the account stalls at the cap. Paid Unlimited Audio ($12/mo) is 'Unmetered bandwidth'. free allowance: 100 GB per month |
| Per-object cap | file size should not exceed 500MB (500000000 bytes) |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | rest rest |
| Tooling | No public upload API on Free (Podbean developer docs exist for read/embed; upload is dashboard). Migration-in by RSS is one click and is explicitly free, which is a heavier hammer than a per-episode upload. |
| Composes with | 5 hours / 500 MB per free account, 100 GB/mo bandwidth. At ~128 kbps that is ~9 hours of audio; at 500 MB hard cap the file-size ceiling bites first for anything lossless. Genuinely small — only interesting multiplied across many accounts, and each account needs an email + verification. |
| Reliability | Likely re-encodes. Verified live: enclosure https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/rhvxkzpmimms9sf5/riverside_....mp3 -> 302 -> 206, Content-Range 0-1023/73948726; declared length 73948726 for a 3081 s episode = 191,988 bps, i.e. exactly 192 kbps CBR, and the ID3 tag names Lavf60.16.1 (ffmpeg) as the encoder. The upload was a 'riverside_..._processed.mp3' (Riverside's own processed export, normally 128 kbps), so 192k suggests Podbean re-encoded upward rather than storing as-is — unverified without an account, but the ffmpeg stamp plus exact CBR strongly implies server-side processing. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 4
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | help.podbean.com/support/solutions/articles/25000019893-basi | 'Total storage: 5 hours (500MB)'; 'Storage does not reset monthly'; 'Monthly bandwidth: 100GB'; 'Maximum of 3 episodes ... per day'; 'Single file size limit: 100MB'; 'Displays up to 20 episodes in the RSS feed' |
| 2026-10-21 | podbean.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/25000029110 | 'The total file size should not exceed 500MB'; 'Total file length = actual used length + estimated length < 18000 seconds' |
| 2026-10-21 | help.podbean.com/support/solutions/articles/25000005097-podb | 'Free plan: mp3, m4a'; 'The maximum allowed single file size: 3GB' (paid) |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | probe: GET feed.podbean.com/jmonken/feed.xml -> 200; enclosure mcdn.podbean.com -> 302 -> 206, 73,948,726 bytes for 3081 s = 192 kbps, ID3 TSSE 'Lavf60.16.1' |
More fields 1
| dead end | {"failure_class": "quota","why": "5 hours / 500 MB TOTAL, not monthly: 'Total storage: 5 hours (500MB). Note: Storage does not reset monthly.' Help centre adds: 'The total file size should not exceed 500MB' and 'The total length of the file should not exceed 5 hours' — both accumulate and block further uploads when either is hit.","retry_when": null,"first_recorded": "2026-10-21"} |
|---|
Unknown values 3
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read