Choosing a podcast API is a decision you live with for years. The provider shapes your data model, your costs, your rate limits and, often, what features you can build. Yet the options are hard to compare: some publish prices and some do not, some are search engines and some are audience-intelligence tools, and the platform APIs from Apple and Spotify are designed for their own ecosystems first.
This guide compares the main options developers evaluate in 2026. We have tried to be fair and precise. Every competitor price or feature below links to the page we checked, as of October 2026. Where a vendor does not publish something, we say "not published" rather than guess. Prices change; check the linked pages before you commit.
Full disclosure: we build podsearch.org, one of the APIs in this comparison. We have kept our own entry to the same standard of facts as everyone else's.
The short version
| API | Best for | Auth | Published price (as of Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ListenNotes Listen API | General podcast search and metadata in apps | X-ListenAPI-Key header | Free: $0 for 150 req/month. Pro: $200/month base, 5,000 included, then $1.60/$1.30/$1.10 per 1,000. Enterprise: by quote |
| Podcast Index API | Open catalog access, Podcast 2.0 data | Key, secret and SHA-1 signed headers | Free key (docs) |
| Podchaser API | Credits, ratings, audience and industry data | Not verified | Not published |
| Rephonic API | Audience estimates, contacts, outreach data | X-Rephonic-Api-Key header | $299/month including 10,000 requests; higher volumes by contact |
| Apple iTunes Search API | Looking up shows in Apple's directory | No key shown in documented URLs | Free; about 20 calls/minute |
| Spotify Web API | Spotify-integrated apps | OAuth 2.0 | Not published as a paid plan |
| podsearch.org API | Full-text search, freshness, ListenNotes compatibility | X-ListenAPI-Key header | Free: $0 for 150 req/month. Pro: $100/month, 5,000 included, then $0.80/$0.65/$0.55 per 1,000. Enterprise: 50% of your ListenNotes quote |
The rest of this guide explains what those rows mean for a real project.
What to evaluate before you compare vendors
A comparison table is only useful once you know which columns matter to you. Start with these questions.
What is the core job? "Let users find and play podcasts" is a search and metadata problem. "Help a PR team pick shows to pitch" is an audience and contact problem. "Show Spotify listeners their saved shows" is a platform-integration problem. Different vendors are built for each.
How big and how fresh must the catalog be? If you serve long-tail or non-English listeners, catalog breadth matters. If you serve news or sports, minutes of indexing latency matter.
What fields do you need? Basic metadata (title, publisher, artwork, feed URL, episodes, audio URL) is available almost everywhere. Transcripts, chapters, people, audience estimates, contact details and ranking scores are not.
What will it cost at your real volume? Model your expected requests per month, including typeahead, background refresh jobs and retries, and price each plan at that volume rather than at the entry tier.
How hard is it to leave? Response formats that follow a common shape, stable IDs and access to the underlying RSS feed URL all reduce lock-in.
ListenNotes Listen API
ListenNotes runs one of the best-known podcast search engines and its Listen API is widely used by podcast apps. Its pricing page, checked on 2026-10-24, lists three plans:
- Free: $0 a month, 150 requests a month, up to 30 search results per query, and a search rate limit of 2 requests per second and 20 per minute. Requests are suspended until the next month once you pass 150.
- Pro: a $200 base fee covering up to 5,000 requests, then $1.60 per extra 1,000 requests up to 1 million, $1.30 per 1,000 from 1 million to 5 million, and $1.10 per 1,000 beyond. Up to 300 results per query. The page describes Pro rate limits as "medium" without a number.
- Enterprise: custom pricing billed annually, up to 10,000 results per query.
The same page says Pro and Enterprise include transcripts, batch and advanced endpoints, and advanced data fields such as RSS URL, big image, email, Listen Score and global rank. It also lists team seats (3, 10 and 100+), support tiers, a "Powered by Listen Notes" logo requirement on Free and Pro, and server-side caching rules that differ by plan.
Strengths: mature, stable, well documented, with proprietary popularity metrics. Watch out for: overage cost at high volume, the attribution requirement, and the caching rules if you plan to store responses.
Podcast Index API
The Podcast Index is an open, community-run index of podcast RSS feeds and the steward of the Podcast Namespace, the set of "Podcast 2.0" RSS tags. Its API documentation says you can register for a free API key, and that every request must carry User-Agent, X-Auth-Date, X-Auth-Key and Authorization headers (API docs source). The Authorization value is a SHA-1 hash of your key, secret and the current Unix time.
The Podcast Index also publishes a downloadable database dump of its catalog, which many projects use to seed their own systems.
Strengths: free, open, run by the stewards of the Podcast Namespace, and strongly aligned with the open-RSS ecosystem. Watch out for: the signed-header authentication is slightly more work than a single key header; the response format is its own rather than ListenNotes-shaped; and, because it is a community service, you should read its terms and be considerate with request volume. We could not find a published numeric rate limit.
podsearch.org is built on the Podcast Index catalog. The two are complementary: the Podcast Index is the open directory, and podsearch.org adds full-text search across parsed episodes, a ListenNotes-compatible interface, and commercial plans with defined limits.
Podchaser API
Podchaser is known for podcast credits (who hosted, produced or guested on what), ratings and reviews, and industry data. When it launched its API in 2021, coverage at the time reported a free tier based on a points system, and said pricing was not revealed (RAIN News, May 2021). Podchaser's own pricing page could not be retrieved when we checked, and G2's listing says the vendor has not provided pricing. We therefore list API pricing as not published and recommend contacting Podchaser directly.
Strengths: credits and people data are a distinctive asset for PR and industry use cases. Watch out for: confirm pricing, limits and data-use terms with sales before you design around it.
Rephonic API
Rephonic is primarily a podcast research and outreach tool for PR and marketing teams. Its developers page, checked on 2026-10-24, describes a REST API with 25 endpoints and 40-plus search filters, authenticated with an X-Rephonic-Api-Key header, priced at $299 a month including 10,000 requests, with higher volumes by contacting the company and no minimum commitment. The page lists audience estimates (downloads per episode, weekly downloads), listener demographics, contact details for hosts and publishers, transcripts with speaker identification, sponsor data and chart rankings.
Rephonic's web app has separate plans: Light $99, Standard $149 and Business $299 a month, with yearly billing advertised as two months free.
Strengths: audience estimates and contacts that a pure search API does not provide. Watch out for: a higher entry price per request than search-focused APIs; it is optimized for research and outreach rather than for powering a consumer search box.
Apple iTunes Search API
Apple's Search API lets you search the iTunes and Apple Podcasts directory with media=podcast and entities such as podcast and podcastEpisode. The documentation says it is limited to approximately 20 calls per minute, subject to change, and recommends caching for heavier use. The documented URLs include no API key.
Strengths: free, simple, and the authoritative way to find a show's Apple Podcasts ID and artwork. Watch out for: the low rate limit and the fact that it covers Apple's directory rather than the open RSS ecosystem. It is well suited to lookups, not to powering a busy search box.
Spotify Web API
The Spotify Web API's search endpoint accepts type=show and type=episode and is authorized with OAuth 2.0. Availability depends on market: the reference says that if neither a market parameter nor a user country is provided, content is considered unavailable for the client.
Strengths: the right choice when your product is a Spotify integration, such as reading a user's saved shows. Watch out for: results reflect Spotify's catalog and market availability, playback is governed by Spotify's terms, and audio URLs to the original RSS enclosures are not the point of this API. It is not a general-purpose open podcast index.
A note on Chartable
Some older comparisons list Chartable, the podcast analytics and attribution company. Spotify, which acquired it in 2022, announced on September 27, 2024 that it would sunset Chartable, and the service shut down on December 12, 2024 (RAIN News). If you relied on Chartable chart or ranking data, you will need another source; podsearch.org tracks Apple Podcasts charts per country for its browse pages, and several of the vendors above offer ranking data.
podsearch.org API
podsearch.org is a full-text podcast search engine and data provider built on the Podcast Index catalog of about 4.7 million RSS feeds, with around 3.2 million active feeds parsed into episodes. Key facts:
- Compatibility: ListenNotes-compatible REST API at
https://podsearch.org/api/v2, with the same endpoints, parameters, field names andX-ListenAPI-Keyheader. - Search: OpenSearch-backed full-text search over episode titles, descriptions and content; field-specific queries; boolean syntax with
syntax=dql; transcript search withdeep_search=1where feeds publish transcripts. - Freshness: Podping notifications trigger re-polls within seconds to minutes of publish; other feeds are polled adaptively.
- Podcast 2.0: transcripts, chapters, soundbites and persons where feeds provide them.
- AI labels: an LLM classifier labels shows "likely AI-generated" only at 0.9 confidence or higher; coverage is partial and on-demand.
- Pricing: Free $0 (150 requests/month, 2/s, 20/min, 30 results); Pro $100/month (5,000 included, then $0.80, $0.65 and $0.55 per 1,000 by volume tier, 300/min, 300 results, batch endpoints); Enterprise at 50% of a ListenNotes Enterprise quote. These are exactly half of the ListenNotes published prices.
Strengths: price, compatibility, freshness and open-catalog provenance. Watch out for: no proprietary popularity score (Listen Score-style fields return null), no audience-size estimates or demographic data, and a newer service than the incumbents.
Cost at three volumes
Using only published prices, here is what the request-metered plans cost per month. Rephonic's plan is shown at its published included volume only, because higher-volume pricing is by contact.
| Monthly requests | ListenNotes Pro | podsearch.org Pro | Rephonic API |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $200 | $100 | $299 (10,000 included) |
| 100,000 | $200 + 95 × $1.60 = $352 | $100 + 95 × $0.80 = $176 | Not published above 10,000 |
| 1,000,000 | $200 + 995 × $1.60 = $1,792 | $100 + 995 × $0.80 = $896 | Not published |
The Podcast Index API and Apple's Search API are free but are not designed or licensed as high-volume commercial backends; Apple documents about 20 calls per minute. Spotify's Web API serves a different purpose, and we found no published paid tier for it.
How to choose
- Building a consumer podcast app or search feature: a search-focused API. ListenNotes and podsearch.org share a format, so you can start with one and switch, or run both. Use Apple's Search API alongside for Apple IDs.
- Building on open standards or Podcast 2.0 features: the Podcast Index API directly, or podsearch.org if you also want full-text episode search.
- PR, booking or ad sales research: an audience-and-contacts tool such as Rephonic or Podchaser, possibly combined with a cheaper search API for topic discovery.
- Spotify integration: the Spotify Web API, plus a separate index for anything outside Spotify.
Whatever you choose, keep the RSS feed URL in your data model. It is the one identifier every service shares, and it is your exit route if you ever need to switch.
Frequently asked questions
Which podcast API is cheapest?
For metered commercial plans with published prices, podsearch.org Pro is half the price of ListenNotes Pro at every volume tier. The Podcast Index API and Apple's Search API are free, but they have different purposes, terms and limits.
Is there a free podcast API?
Yes. The Podcast Index offers free keys; Apple's Search API is free with a documented limit of about 20 calls per minute; ListenNotes and podsearch.org both offer free plans of 150 requests a month.
Which API has transcripts?
ListenNotes lists transcripts on its Pro and Enterprise plans; Rephonic lists transcripts with speaker identification; podsearch.org returns transcripts where feeds publish a <podcast:transcript> tag. Coverage varies, so test with your own sample.
Which API has listener numbers?
Rephonic lists downloads-per-episode and weekly download estimates on its developers page. ListenNotes lists its Listen Score and global rank as advanced fields. podsearch.org does not estimate audience size.
Can I switch from ListenNotes without rewriting my code?
To podsearch.org, mostly yes: the endpoints, parameters, field names and header match. You will need to change the base URL and key, and re-map stored IDs using RSS feed URLs.
Summary
There is no single best podcast API, only the best fit for a job. Search-and-metadata APIs (ListenNotes, podsearch.org, the Podcast Index) power apps; research tools (Rephonic, Podchaser) power PR and sales teams; platform APIs (Apple, Spotify) connect you to one ecosystem. Price your real volume, confirm the fields you need, and keep the RSS feed URL as your anchor so you can always change course.