After years of being duped by these assholes, there was no other choice left but to build my own podcast, webcast and broadcast architecture, and not be a slave to them for my own content.
Today, we launch CrossCast.
Not with a press release. Not with venture capital. Not with a growth hacker’s playbook. With help from God, with honesty — and with three truths the podcast industry has quietly buried for years.
The Big Picture
When was the last time you calculated what you produced and what you actually spent on your podcasts and hosting? Maybe you’re satisfied, maybe not.
The Lie You’ve Been Paying For
If you host a podcast, you’ve been told a story. The story goes like this: “Distributing your show to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio is complex, expensive, and something you should be grateful your platform handles for you”. The other part of the story: when your audience grows, your bill grows. That’s just how it works.
Neither part of that story is fully true.
Here is what is actually true.
Podcast distribution costs nothing. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon — every major directory — pulls your RSS feed on their own servers, at their own cost, on their own schedule. You submit a URL once. They do the rest forever. There is no API (Application Programming Interface). There is no per-listener charge. There is no cost. Many podcasting platforms have been vague about this for years because clarity would cost them revenue.
Downloads should never be billed. We store audio on Cloudflare R2, which has zero egress fees. A million plays costs the same as one play — only the storage is billed, and storage is predictable. A podcast with 10GB of episodes should not cost you what they bill you for.
The “download billing” model your current platform uses is not a cost of doing business passed to you honestly. It is a mechanism to extract money from you when you succeed. It punishes growth. We find that wrong.
Live radio infrastructure costs real money — and we built it in anyway. AzuraCast is open source software, but running it properly — with scheduling, simulcast to YouTube and Mixlr, live listener counts, real concurrent capacity — requires dedicated infrastructure. We run it. We maintain it. And instead of locking it behind an enterprise tier or charging thousands a month the way the industry has always done, we built it into our Studio plan and above. Because a platform that only works for large institutions is not a platform — it is a gate. We removed the gate because it changes what a podcast can be.
Unless they start to copy us, these three facts together mean CrossCast can offer more than the competitor at a better output and price, with no surprise costs, and still be sustainable with few paying users than more.
What CrossCast Is
CrossCast is a podcast hosting and distribution platform built on honest infrastructure and one feature no competitor offers natively — a Live Radio Toggle.
Every show on CrossCast can flip a switch and become a live, looping, scheduled internet radio station. Your episodes auto-queue. Listeners tune in live. You can simulcast simultaneously to YouTube Live, Mixlr, or anywhere that accepts a stream. Your podcast becomes a live, 24/7 streaming radio station.
Everything else is done right for the first time:
- Storage-based pricing only. You never pay per download. Going viral changes nothing about your bill.
- Distribution on every plan, including free. Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, Pocket Casts — all of them, no upsell, no gatekeeping.
- One-click import from anywhere. Paste your RSS feed. Every episode, every title, every description, every chapter marker, every piece of artwork — imported perfectly. Audio migrates to our storage in the background while you keep publishing.
- Connect your domain
- Validate you podcast for QC before submitting to networks
- Your podcast page and live radio page
- No contracts. No lock-in. No surprise costs.
- What else do you want?
Who This Is For
This is for the independent voice. The journalist running a news show from a home studio. The scholar sharing knowledge that would otherwise never be recorded. The activist community that deserves a radio station but was told radio is only for institutions that can afford one.
This is for the 28 shows I personally moved to CrossCast — including The Majestic Reading, a 114-episode Arabic Quran reading that now has its own live radio station at thequranradio.live — because I built this platform so I put the work of God on it first and then my own podcasts that I’ve been moving from one platform to another or stayed with one for years only to discover that I was fooled. Thank God. Not anymore. Now maybe it’s your turn.
If it is not good enough for what I care about most, it is not good enough to offer to anyone else. That is the standard starting point.
A Note on Why We Build This
Global Crossover builds digital platforms with intention. That word — intention — means something specific to us. It means we do not build to extract. We do not design dark patterns. We do not hide costs in footnotes, we mention it where needed, and we do not punish loyalty with tiered confusion.
It also means we build knowing that nothing we make, including CrossCast, including every line of code, every server, every session — none of it lasts forever. What we put into the world with sincerity, if wishes the God, maybe that remains.
The Quran is the clearest and most enduring broadcast in human history. Preserved. Unchanged. Transmitted across many centuries without a platform, without a subscription, without a download fee. That is the standard we aim for in truth and in scale — content that is worth transmitting, transmitted honestly, to whoever wishes to receive it.
Today is a Good day to Start Fresh
CrossCast is live at crosscast.stream.
If you have a podcast, import it in two minutes. If you do not have one yet, start free — no card needed.
If you have been paying other companies while your bill quietly grows with your audience — come see what honest infrastructure looks like.
The toggle is ready. The station is yours.
In sha Allah – If wishes the God.
Imran Siddiqui is the founder of Global Crossover, a multi-platform media and technology company. CrossCast is a Global Crossover project.
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