drea
podcast ad blocker
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
Always been annoyed by podcast ads. Searched and found a few apps that can detect and skip them, but they were all paid. So I made a free one. To my knowledge this is the first podcast app with free ad block.iOS (26+) only for now. If the app becomes popular I'll def think of doing an Android version as well.The app doesn't require a user account. I may open-source it at some point; still thinking about it. If anyone's suspicious about how it's able to be free, i.e. doesn't it cost money to run, are you selling my data (I'm not) etc. I'm happy to explain in the comments.From a technical perspective, the innovation here is ad detection despite dynamic/programmatic ads, which is the norm in most popular podcasts these days. There is ofc a naive way to do it, but it's expensive and high latency. There is also an even simpler way but it's illegal lol (re-host and serve just one version of the episode). I was able to figure out a way to do it that's cheap, low latency, and legal: Shazam-style audio fingerprinting.From today on, you never have to listen to a podcast ad again. tearsofjoy.jpegCheers.
HN · launched May 18, 2026 · 9 upvotes (top 45%) · 0 views
Niche: podcast tools and platforms · 76 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 76 launches in podcast tools and platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial Building a standard podcast player UI is straightforward, but reliably detecting and cutting sponsor segments locally or maintaining a crowd-sourced/audio-fingerprinting ad database is the difficult technical barrier.
What it would actually take: A functional podcast ad blocker needs either an on-device ML model (e.g., fine-tuned audio classification/transcription pipeline like Whisper to identify sponsored ad breaks) or an integration with community-driven databases like SponsorBlock. The app must fetch feeds, parse dynamic ad insertions (DAI), compute acoustic fingerprints or analyze speech transcripts on the fly, and seamlessly skip chunks during playback using AVPlayer. This requires audio processing and ML pipeline expertise beyond standard app scaffolding.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: PodSkip
Concerns raised: Ads not being skipped in some cases, Unclear how free service is sustainable given hosting/processing costs, Audio fingerprinting may not work when podcast host reads ads
Feature requests: Auto-detect and skip ads without manual button tap
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 215 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #88 of 216 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 197 days after the earliest competitor.
- Steadcast · hn · 2026-04-10 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- BaitoCast · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Hush · github · 2026-10-23 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- CastLoom Pro · hn · 2026-03-16 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Pauseless · hn · 2026-11-04 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- spotify-ad-blocker-pro · github · 2026-10-06 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- PodSafe · ph · 2026-10-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Redpanda · ph · 2026-10-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.