Version 2.0 -Effective: October 4, 2026
Podcast Index LLC ("Podcast Index," "we," "us," "our") is a partnership that exists to preserve, protect, and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem. We provide a free, open, categorized podcast index along with APIs and public data downloads so that developers, organizations, and hobbyists can build podcast experiences without having to do the heavy lifting of indexing and data management themselves.
Our API, public data downloads, and associated documentation (collectively, "the Service") are available to you free of charge for any lawful purpose, including commercial use. You may:
You may not create a public-facing service that simply proxies, re-serves, or routes requests to the Podcast Index API. This includes, but is not limited to, building a public API, MCP server, or similar intermediary layer that passes traffic through to our infrastructure.
You may not systematically crawl or scrape the API to pull bulk podcast or episode data - for example, sequentially walking through IDs or paging through all results. The API is designed for targeted, on-demand lookups in response to user activity, not for harvesting the full dataset. If scraping is detected, your credentials will be blocked.
Why? Our servers and bandwidth are funded by donations and the goodwill of our community. We happily serve individual developers and their apps directly, but we cannot absorb the load of bulk scraping or someone else's entire user base funneled through a proxy layer.
What you can do instead: If you want the full dataset, download it. We make this easy - our full feed catalog is published weekly as a SQLite database, and numerous other data exports are available at podcastindex.org/datasets. You are free to build your own podcast index from this data and run your own public API from it.
Access to the API requires registering for credentials (an API key and secret). Keep these confidential. Do not share them publicly or embed them in client-side code or open-source repositories. If you believe your credentials have been compromised, contact us and we will issue new ones.
We do not allow developer registrations from free email services (e.g. gmail.com) due to a history of abuse from those providers. Please register with an email address tied to your project or organization.
All API requests must include a User-Agent string that specifically identifies your application.
Generic or default library user-agents (e.g. axios, curl, wget,
GuzzleHttp, python-requests) do not tell us who the traffic belongs to and will be
rate-limited or blocked. Impersonating a web browser (e.g. sending a Chrome or Firefox user-agent) or an
application you are not the developer of is also prohibited. Set your User-Agent to something like
MyCoolPodcastApp/1.0 -your own app name, honestly represented.
We apply rate limits to keep the service healthy for everyone. These limits are not published -we continuously tune them in response to our available budget and the traffic patterns we observe. If your usage is reasonable and in the spirit of these terms, you are unlikely to hit them. If you do get rate-limited and believe it's in error, reach out to us and we will work with you.
For bulk data needs, use the public data downloads rather than making large numbers of API calls.
We retain API logs for 90 days. These logs are used to detect abuse patterns, tune the platform for performance, and identify gaps in our data so we can correct them.
The Service is provided "as is" with no guarantees of uptime, accuracy, or fitness for any particular purpose. We do our best to keep things running and correct, but we are a small, donation-funded project and cannot make promises about availability or data completeness. If you rely on the Podcast Index as a key component of a commercial product, you do so at your own risk. We suggest a good caching strategy, which is always best practice.
To the extent permitted by law, Podcast Index LLC and its contributors are not liable for any damages arising from your use of the Service. Since the Service is free, our total liability to you is zero dollars.
Do not use the Service to:
We reserve the right to suspend or revoke access to anyone who violates these terms or uses the Service in a way that harms the project or its community.
We respect the right to be forgotten. If you want your API developer account and associated data removed, send an email requesting deletion to [email protected].
Podcast Index LLC is a registered DMCA agent. If you are a content creator and want your podcast de-listed from the index, send a takedown request to [email protected]. You must be able to prove ownership of the content in question for the request to be processed.
We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we will update the version number and effective date at the top of this page. Continued use of the Service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated terms. In accordance with our personal values we never send bulk mailings so no emails will be sent notifying you if these terms change in the future. Check back periodically if you feel it's in your interests to do so.
These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and the State of Texas. Any disputes will be resolved in the courts of the State of Texas.
Questions about these terms? Email us at [email protected].