TrueFans

TrueFans is the podcast app that treats Podcasting 2.0 as the business model, not just a spec. It's built by Sam Sethi, one of the best-known independent-podcasting voices in the industry, and it aims to give small shows what platforms give big ones without the platform.

Origins

TrueFans is founded and run by Sam Sethi, who also co-hosts the weekly Podnews Weekly Review with James Cridland, one of the podcast industry's most-cited news sources. Sam had spent years talking about what Podcasting 2.0 could enable and, when the spec started to solidify around value-for-value and micropayments, built the app he'd been arguing for. The company runs Creators from TrueFans, a companion show launched in 2025, as its public shop window for how creators use the platform.

What it does

TrueFans is a full creator marketplace and player. Listeners can pay creators directly as they stream a show, send one-off donations after a good episode, or set up monthly memberships. Creators can charge for a whole podcast, an individual episode, or a single chapter, and the app supports the majority of Podcasting 2.0 spec tags out of the box (chapters, transcripts, podcast:person, cross-app comments, live streaming).

Both audio and video are supported. Creators can host the show on TrueFans directly or point at their existing RSS feed and layer TrueFans's monetisation on top; the publisher stays in control of the source. TrueFans is also a member of the Podcast Standards Project coalition.

Where you get it

iOS App Store, Google Play, and a web player. Free to install. Payments go directly to the creator, and TrueFans takes a platform fee to fund operations.

Current stance

Actively developed by a small team, deeply plugged into the Podcasting 2.0 industry conversation via Sam's Podnews and Creators from TrueFans work. If you want to actually pay small creators for shows you love (the movement's founding proposition), this is one of the more approachable ways to do it in 2026. If you want the same story with an open-source, cross-platform codebase, Podverse is the sibling to look at. If you want a Lightning-native starting point where the wallet story is the whole product, look at Fountain.