Where Your Podcast Subscription Money Goes: Five Platforms Compared

The first thing to know about your podcast subscription is that no one inside the show ever sees your £4. They see what is left after the platform takes its cut, after the card networks take theirs, after the currency conversion if you are not buying in US dollars. By the time the host reads ‘thank you to our supporters’ out loud, the money has already passed through three intermediaries.

This used to be a niche concern. As recently as 2021, premium podcast feeds were a curiosity — a Patreon backer wall around a few mid-listed shows, the occasional Stitcher Premium archive. Then Apple launched in-app subscriptions, Spotify announced a zero-cut subscription option, and Substack started offering audio to its newsletter writers. Five years on, paid podcasting is a real market, and engaged listeners are paying into it more often than they realise.

Edison Research's most recent Infinite Dial data suggests roughly one in five regular podcast listeners now pays for at least one show. The average paying listener supports two. That is enough volume that the platform a show picks stops being incidental to its economics — it is the economics.

Here is what is actually happening to the money on each of the five major platforms.

Apple Podcasts Subscriptions

Apple's subscription product launched in 2021 with the same in-app purchase economics that govern every other App Store transaction: 30% of a subscriber's payments in the first year, 15% from year two onward, plus a $19.99 annual fee to remain enrolled in the Apple Podcasters Program.

That 30% first-year cut is the worst headline rate in the market. The compensation is discoverability. Apple Podcasts is still the default audio app on roughly half of British smartphones, and the subscription badge appears directly on the show's page in front of every listener already opening the app. No marketing acquisition cost. No private RSS feed for the listener to copy across. They tap, they pay, the premium feed populates.

The trade-off is data. Apple does not pass subscriber email addresses to the show. Anonymous identifiers, churn metrics, basic geography — that is the entire dashboard. If a host wants to email subscribers about a live show or a merch drop, they cannot. The listener belongs to Apple.

Spotify Subscriptions

Spotify spent 2021 to 2024 trying to be the platform every paid podcast lived on. It bought The Ringer, signed Joe Rogan exclusively, courted Joe Budden. By 2025 the strategy had visibly cooled, but the open subscription tooling Spotify built during that push is still in place — and it now offers the most generous revenue split of any major platform.

Spotify takes 0% of subscription revenue. Payment processing runs through Stripe at the standard 2.9% plus 30p in the UK, which is the only meaningful skim. For a £4.99 a month subscriber, the show keeps roughly £4.70 — about 50p more than the equivalent Apple subscription would yield even in year two.

The catch is that Spotify subscriptions only play inside Spotify. There is no exportable RSS feed, no Apple Podcasts cross-listing, no Pocket Casts or Overcast. Listeners who do not already use Spotify will not subscribe. And the platform has been cooling on podcast investment generally, which makes betting your monetisation on Spotify's tooling longevity a bigger leap of faith than it was two years ago.

Patreon

Patreon predates the modern podcast subscription economy. It started in 2013 as a way to fund YouTubers, and the largest membership-driven podcasts on the planet — Chapo Trap House, My Brother My Brother and Me, Last Podcast on the Left, Maintenance Phase — still live on it.

The fee structure is tiered. Patreon's ‘Pro' plan takes 8% of pledges; ‘Premium' takes 12% in exchange for a dedicated customer support team and priority features. Payment processing on top is roughly 2.9% plus 30p per transaction, dropping for higher-volume creators. A £4 monthly pledge nets the show somewhere between £3.30 and £3.50 depending on tier and processing band.

What Patreon offers that Apple does not is ownership. Creators get the email list, the membership tier customisation, the polling and posting tools, the merch integration. Premium podcast feeds run as private RSS URLs that play in any podcast app the listener already uses. The listener stays the listener's; only the cheque clears through Patreon.

Substack Audio

Substack added paid audio in 2022, treating it as a feature of newsletters rather than a podcast platform in its own right. That framing has not changed, and it remains the right way to think about it. Substack is for creators whose primary product is a newsletter and whose podcast is a companion to it — not the other way round.

Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue plus Stripe processing. The economics are essentially identical to Patreon's middle tier. What Substack uniquely offers is the recommendation engine: subscribed Substack readers get cross-promoted to similar publications inside the platform's own surface, which has become a meaningful acquisition channel for newsletter-native shows like The Bulwark Podcast and Bari Weiss's Honestly.

The downside is that Substack's audio player is functional rather than excellent. Listeners who care about playback speed, chapter markers or queueing tend to copy the private RSS link into Overcast or Pocket Casts. Substack permits this — it is not a closed garden — but it does mean the platform's lock-in is weaker than its competitors'.

Supercast

Supercast is the only one of the five built specifically for podcasters. Founded in 2020 by Jonas Woost, formerly of CBC, it has become the quiet workhorse for shows that want a private RSS feed without the broader creator-economy apparatus Patreon insists on.

Pricing sits at roughly 12% of revenue plus Stripe processing — the highest fee of any non-Apple option, but the trade-off is podcast-native tooling. Supercast handles ad-free feed swaps, bonus-episode-only feeds, multi-show bundles, gift subscriptions and team accounts in a way the generalist platforms do not. 99% Invisible's premium tier ran on Supercast for years; Reality Steve and several large indie shows still do.

For a podcaster who already has an audience and wants the listener experience to feel like a podcast — not a Patreon community, not a newsletter — Supercast is the most coherent option. For everyone else, the higher fee is hard to justify.

The numbers, side by side

A worked example, using a single £4.99 monthly subscriber:

1. Apple, year one: the show receives roughly £3.16 after Apple's 30% cut and conversion margins. Apple holds the listener relationship.
2. Apple, year two: about £3.93, once the cut drops to 15%.
3. Spotify: roughly £4.70, after Stripe processing only.
4. Patreon Pro (8%): about £4.45 after fees and processing.
5. Substack (10%): about £4.35.
6. Supercast (12%): about £4.25.

The headline rate is misleading on its own. A show that would not exist without Apple's discoverability gets 100% of nothing on Spotify. A show with an engaged email list extracts almost no value from Apple's distribution and a great deal from Substack's. Asking which platform is ‘best' without specifying which show you mean is the wrong question.

Which kind of show belongs where

• News-driven and breaking-story shows that need to convert casual app browsers fast: Apple. The discoverability premium is worth the 30% in year one because most subscribers will not stay long enough for year two anyway.
• Established shows with community attached — fan forums, merch, live tours: Patreon. The 8–12% fee buys tooling Apple simply does not have, and the listener relationship survives a platform change.
• Newsletter writers who also record: Substack. The cross-promotion engine and the unified subscriber list outweigh the modest player limitations.
• Mid-sized indie shows that just want a clean ad-free feed without a community layer: Supercast. The fee is the highest of the non-Apple options, but the listener experience is the closest to a normal podcast.
• Shows already deep inside Spotify's ecosystem with a Spotify-native audience: Spotify Subscriptions. The 0% rate is real money, but only if the audience is already there.

So what should listeners take from this?

Two things, when you look at the badge on a show's homepage and decide whether to subscribe.

First, the platform tells you something about the show's stage. New shows, news-driven shows, anything trying to convert casual app browsers tends to be on Apple. Established shows with a community already attached tend to be on Patreon or Supercast. Newsletter writers who happen to record gravitate to Substack. None of these is better than the others — they are signals about what the show prioritises.

Second, the platform tells you whether the host actually has a relationship with you. On Patreon, Substack and Supercast they have your email and can write to you when something matters. On Apple they cannot, and on Spotify only barely. If you are paying to support a maker rather than to access content, that distinction is worth knowing. The £4 is the same. What you get back, beyond the audio, is not.