The €0 Premium
You are paying a monthly fee for the basics
Think about what your podcast app actually charges you for.
Not being interrupted by ads. Downloading an episode so it plays in the metro. Pausing on the train and picking it up on the laptop at the exact second you left off. Not having a profile quietly assembled out of everything you listen to at two in the morning.
None of that is a luxury. It is what listening to audio should have been from the start. Yet most of it has been packaged, given a name with a capital P, and billed to you every month.
In Spain, as of 13 July 2026, Spotify Premium is €11.99 a month on an individual plan. YouTube Music Premium is €10.99. iVoox Premium is €3.99. That is roughly €130 a year, at the top end, to be left alone. (Prices are the ones the companies published on that date; they can change, and they usually change upwards.)
We want to be precise here, because a comparison that cheats is worth nothing. Spotify and YouTube Music do not charge you for cross-device sync — it works on their free tiers, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What they charge you for is listening without ads and downloading for offline. That is the real paywall, and it is the one people actually feel. On iVoox, sync sits behind Premium too.
On Onion Podcasts, the price of all four of those things is €0. There is no upgrade button. There is no Premium tier to forget to cancel. There is nothing above the thing you are already using.
What "free" costs you everywhere else
The free tiers of the big apps are not free. They are paid for with two things that never appear on an invoice.
The first is your attention, sold on. An ad break is not a small tax on your time. It is the product being made out of you, in the middle of an episode you chose, for a message you did not.
The second is your profile. What you listen to says a great deal about you: your politics, your health, your faith, your loneliness, whether you are trying to quit something. An advertising business needs to know those things, so it builds a model of you, and that model is the asset. You are not the customer of that arrangement. You are the inventory.
That is the deal on the table. Pay around €12 a month to opt out of the ads, and keep paying with your data anyway.
What you get here, stated exactly
We would rather be precise than impressive, so here is the inventory. Where something has a condition, the condition is printed right next to it instead of hidden in a footnote.
No ads. Not fewer ads. None. There is no ad-serving code in this platform at all — no pre-rolls, no mid-rolls, no banners, no sponsored slots inserted over a creator's voice. What the creator published is what you hear. That is not a promise about our future good behaviour; it is a fact about what the software does and does not contain.
No tracking, no profiling. We do not build an advertising profile of you. No cross-site tracking, no advertising cookies, no behavioural targeting, no data sold to anybody. The platform is hosted in the EU, under the GDPR, because that is where the machines physically are — not because a compliance page says so. What you listen to is your business.
Cross-device sync — and this one needs a free account. Pause on your phone, open your laptop, carry on at the same second. It is the one feature that genuinely cannot work anonymously, because your position has to be stored somewhere, and "somewhere" means a server. So the account is an honest requirement, not a toll gate: it is free, it takes under a minute, and it never turns into a bill. The account is the upgrade, and the upgrade is still €0.
Offline downloads — mobile app only, no account needed. In the Onion mobile app you can download episodes and listen with no signal at all. It is a download manager, plainly: you start a download, you watch the progress, you can cancel it, you can delete it, and you can see how much storage you are using. It does not fetch things behind your back — there is no automatic downloading, because we would rather you decide what lands on your phone. And to be clear about the boundary: downloads do not exist in the web player. The web streams. If you want offline, you want the app.
One more piece of honesty about that app. The Android version is in closed testing right now. Google requires twelve testers before it will let an app like ours go public, and we are not there yet, so there is no store listing to send you to. If you would like to be one of those testers and get offline downloads early, write to contact@onionpodcasts.com and we will add you.
So how do we pay for this?
This is the part that decides whether any of the above is worth believing, so here it is with nothing behind it.
Today, Onion collects nothing. From anyone. Not from you, and not from creators either.
When a listener subscribes to a creator on this platform, the payment is charged on that creator's own Stripe account, with the creator's own keys. The money goes from the listener to the creator and never passes through us. We do not hold it, we do not route it, we do not sit in the middle of it. There is nothing for us to take a cut of, because we never have it.
The plan, eventually, is to charge a 10% commission to creators who are already earning money. Never listeners. Never a creator who has earned nothing. Only a share of income that actually exists, once it actually exists — and the first creators who join pay nothing at all. That is the intended business. It is not what happens today, and we are not going to describe a future fee as if it were already a revenue stream.
There is no venture capital in this company. There is no parent company. Onion Podcasts is built in Mallorca by a small independent team and hosted in the EU. Nobody is waiting on a return, which means nobody is going to arrive in eighteen months demanding ads, a Premium tier, or a data partnership to make the numbers work. There is no board to be sold out to, because there is no board.
That is the whole trick, and it is not really a trick. If a company's income comes from advertising, it eventually needs to know who you are. Ours does not, so it does not.
The honest small print
We are not going to write "free forever" and let you assume we can guarantee it. Nobody can honestly promise a decade of anything. Companies that swore they would never run ads now run ads, and every one of them meant it at the time.
Here is the promise that can actually be kept instead. The business is built so that charging listeners is not the fallback. The money is meant to come from a small share of creator income that only exists once a creator is genuinely earning. That is structure rather than slogan, and structure is the only kind of promise worth much. If anything about it ever changes, it will be written on this blog, in plain language, before it happens — not emailed to you afterwards, the way these things usually arrive.
And while we are being honest: Onion Podcasts is new, and small. This is not a giant. The catalogue is still growing, and if a show you love is not here yet, tell us and we will go and get it. We would rather say that plainly than dress up a young platform as a crowded one. What we can promise is what the product does, and the product does everything above, today.
Podcasts, and the radio too
One thing the big apps mostly do not do: live radio. Onion Podcasts carries live radio stations in the same player as the podcasts, so you can go from an episode straight to a station without switching apps, and without an account.
The platform speaks English, Spanish and Catalan — interface and content — because it was built somewhere that speaks all three, and because a listener in Palma should not have to use a product designed for a listener in San Francisco.
Just press play
The last thing worth saying is the least dramatic one.
You do not need an account to listen. No sign-up wall, no "continue with" button, no email address handed over before you are allowed to hear anything. Open a podcast, hit play, and it plays. The account exists for sync, follows and playlists — it is an upgrade, not a turnstile.
Everything the other apps put behind a monthly fee is already here, already on, and already yours. There is nothing to upgrade to.