Fountain

Fountain is the podcast app that turned "value-for-value" from a manifesto into a real product. Nick Malster and Oscar Merry founded it in 2021, and the app has since become the reference client for Lightning-based value-for-value across the industry.

Origins

Fountain launched in 2021 as a Podcasting 2.0-native player with a built-in Bitcoin Lightning wallet. The founders paired their Podcasting 2.0 belief with a small pre-seed cheque from Anthony Pompliano, and Oscar has been a regular guest on Adam Curry and Dave Jones's Podcasting 2.0 podcast ever since. Fountain is where a lot of the newer podcast:* namespace tags get their first real listener stress-test.

How value-for-value works

Every episode you play can stream small Bitcoin micropayments (sats, or hundred-millionths of a bitcoin) to the host, the show, and any guests, split however the publisher has configured the split in their RSS feed. You can send a one-off "boost" with an on-record comment that lands as an item in the show's dashboard. None of this needs a credit card or a separate wallet app: Fountain hosts a Lightning wallet inside the app and abstracts the crypto plumbing away.

Fountain also runs a "listen-to-earn" model where listeners get sats streamed to their wallet during their first hour of listening each day. It's small money, but the goal is to bootstrap a wallet balance for people who then go on to send it back to the shows they like.

What it does besides Lightning

Fountain is a normal RSS podcast player at its core, so you can subscribe to any show whether or not the publisher has enabled value-for-value. It also has strong clip-sharing (a listener can grab a short chunk of an episode and share it with a burned-in caption), Podcasting 2.0 transcripts and chapters, and the growing set of podcast:* namespace tags. Fountain is a member of the Podcast Standards Project coalition, one of the industry-side groups keeping the open-podcasting spec honest.

Where you get it

iOS App Store and Google Play, both free. Premium (~$2.99/mo) unlocks AI-generated summaries and some quality-of-life extras.

Current stance

Actively developed by a small team, one of the most-cited apps in the Podcasting 2.0 conversation, and the first real answer to "what would podcasting look like if listeners could pay creators directly without a platform in the middle?" If you want a similar value-for-value story from a different starting point, look at Podverse, Castamatic, or TrueFans, each of which supports it as one feature among many.