Short version: the listener experience is the product. We don't need to charge you to hear music. We never will.
Open a station link. Music plays.
That's the experience we're protecting. Everything that modern streaming has piled on top of that — the cookie banners, the pre-roll ads, the interruption ads, the "please subscribe" popups, the mandatory account creation, the suggested-content autoplay loops, the behavioral tracking — none of it is music. It's middleware. We never built any of it, and we're not going to.
Concretely, as a listener on AWE Radio you get:
Most streaming platforms charge a subscription because they spent the last decade building ad infrastructure, recommendation engines, and behavioral-data pipelines. Then they offer you a way to pay every month to opt out of the parts that made those platforms profitable in the first place.
We think that's a strange shape. Music streaming doesn't intrinsically need any of that — it only needs it if you're planning to sell the audience's attention to somebody else. We aren't. So the middleware doesn't exist, and you don't have to pay to turn it off.
The cheapest feature to build is the one you never build. We didn't build ads. That's why there aren't any.
We're not being generous. We're using infrastructure that makes the listener-facing cost of this platform close to zero.
Cloudflare R2 serves the audio. R2 has $0 egress — the bandwidth cost that usually sinks free platforms is genuinely free here. A listener streaming for ten hours costs us fractions of a cent.
Fly.io runs the streaming machines that encode each station's audio, at a few dollars per station per month. That's where the actual audio work happens.
Firebase handles metadata, auth, real-time listener counts. Heavy use stays inside the free tier for a long time.
We don't take VC money. There's no growth target we have to hit. No investor deck that projects "monetize the audience in year three." The platform is built by Retro 87, a tiny Swedish company, and it's cost-positive at modest scale just on station-owner upgrades (see below) without ever touching listeners.
We're going to introduce paid tiers. We want to be upfront about it now, because we don't want anyone to feel bait-and-switched later.
The pledge: paid tiers are for station owners who want extended broadcasting capabilities — things like longer live sessions, higher-quality video, more simultaneous channels, archive recording, custom domains. They will never put a feature behind a paywall that's free today, and they will never touch the listener experience.
Running a station at the current free tier is not a trial. It's not a demo. It's the real platform. You can build a real audience on it without ever paying us a cent. Plenty of stations will never need to upgrade.
What paid tiers let us do is serve station owners who need more — a club that streams 12-hour DJ sets, a production company that wants multi-camera broadcasts, a podcast network that needs archive access. For everyone else, free continues to be free, and the architecture stays the same.
Our bet is that the internet will keep getting worse in specific ways — more ads, more paywalls, more popups, more of your attention being treated as inventory — and that a small number of places where it doesn't happen will be disproportionately valuable.
We want AWE Radio to be one of those places. For listeners, that means: open a link, hear music, leave. For station owners, that means: tools that work, pricing that makes sense, and a platform that isn't secretly working against the audience you're building.
If we ever change this, you'll read it here first.