This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
Castria scans every podcast episode, finds the ads, sponsor reads, and commercial breaks, and skips them automatically while you listen. Plus AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and offline downloads. On iPhone, Android, and web. 100% free.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I built Castria because I love podcasts, and I want to enjoy them as they were in the Golden Age, before the ever-expanding ad-enshittification began.
Audio is the most intimate medium: a voice right in your ears, usually while your hands and eyes are busy with something else: driving, the gym, the dishes. That's exactly why the ads grate. A display ad on a page your eyes skim past without a thought. A podcast ad you either sit through or blindly fast-forward overshooting, rewinding, missing the actual show, and you have to stop what you were doing just to do it.
The paid options don't fix it. A premium player subscription (Spotify Premium and the like) removes the app's own ads, but the sponsor reads and dynamically inserted breaks baked into the episode still play. A premium per-show subscription clears the ads for exactly one show, and I can't afford to subscribe to every show I love.
So Castria does the obvious thing, for all your shows, for free: it scans each episode the moment it arrives, finds every ad, sponsor read, and commercial break, and skips them automatically while you listen. No fast-forwarding, no guessing where the show comes back.
The part I care about most: it's fair to podcasters. Think of it as the TiVo of podcasts. You download the exact file the publisher served — dynamic ads and all — and Castria simply skips those segments on playback, the same as fast-forwarding by hand. We never modify, re-host, or touch the file. DVR ad-skipping didn't kill TV, and this doesn't hurt the shows you love; you're getting them exactly as their creators shipped them.
A few other things:
A real player, not a one-trick utility. Queue, offline downloads, sleep timer, cross-device sync, car controls. You're not trading down to get the ad skip.
Transparent and reversible. Every ad listed with its timestamp, type, a confidence score, and a quote; keep any sponsor you want with one tap.
An AI layer on top. Plain-language summaries, tappable topics, and searchable transcripts.
Genuinely free. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads of our own.
Fastest way to try it is right in your browser. Castria.app, no install needed. Also on the App Store and Google Play, all on one account.
I'd genuinely love your feedback. especially edge cases where the skip gets an ad boundary wrong. That's exactly what I want to tighten. I'll be here all day. 🎧
honestly this sounds amazing for someone like me who listens during commute, one thing that would make it even better is letting users set custom skip thresholds like only skip ads longer than 30 seconds since some shorter host reads are actually kind of interesting
The auto-skip feature for sponsor reads is such a thoughtful touch, finally saving my commute time from those endless mid-roll breaks. Really well executed app.
Finally a podcast app that gets the ad skipping right without mangling the dialogue around it. The transcripts being searchable is a really nice bonus for going back to find that one quote.
Finally a podcast player that actually skips the ad reads, not just mutes them for a sec. The auto generated summaries are surprisingly on point too.
About Castria on Product Hunt
“Podcasts, minus the ads. Automatically, and free”
Castria was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 9 upvotes and 6 comments, placing #72 on the daily leaderboard. Castria scans every podcast episode, finds the ads, sponsor reads, and commercial breaks, and skips them automatically while you listen. Plus AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and offline downloads. On iPhone, Android, and web. 100% free.
Castria was featured in Android (57.4k followers), Music (53.5k followers), Spotify (24.2k followers) and Audio (2.1k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 58.4k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Castria?
Castria was hunted by James Wallace. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Castria stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
James Wallace