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Radio hosting

Radio hosting. On air in ten minutes.

Open a station, point your encoder at it, and start broadcasting. A thousand people can listen at once, your player carries no advertising, and nobody counts your bandwidth.

Nothing on this page waits until the checkout to become a charge.

Open a free station See when you would pay

Broadcasting from our own machines in New York and Bucharest since 2009.

Getting on air

Ten minutes, and eight of them are yours

Nothing here waits on us. There is no provisioning queue, no sales call, and no approval step — the account is built the moment the setup fee clears.

  1. 0:00

    Open the account

    An email address and a password. The one-time setup fee is taken here, and it is the only charge a free station ever generates.

  2. 1:00

    Your panel login arrives

    Every station is managed from the radio section of your Primcast dashboard — start and stop the stream, see who is listening, copy the player for your site. It is the same panel on every plan, free included.

  3. 3:00

    Copy four settings into your encoder

    Server, port, mount point, password. That is the whole configuration, and it is identical whether you broadcast with SHOUTcast or Icecast.

  4. 6:00

    Press connect

    Use the free software encoders if you have none — Mixxx runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. A hardware encoder broadcasts from the studio with no computer at all.

  5. 8:00

    Hand out your link

    Your stream URL is https:// from the first minute, so it plays inside any modern page without a browser blocking it. Embed the player, or send the link as it is.

The absent charges

What we never bill you for

Most radio hosts sell listener slots, then bill for the bandwidth those listeners use. We do neither. Every limit a plan has is a ceiling it stops at, never an overage on the invoice.

  • Not per listener. Each plan has one fixed ceiling — a thousand people at once on the free plan, 2,500 on Premium, 5,000 on Platinum — and nobody under it costs extra. The paid plans also include a month of listening, 500,000 listener hours on Premium and 1.5 million on Platinum; reaching it pauses new listeners until the 1st, it never adds a charge.
  • Not for bandwidth. Bandwidth is unmetered. A quiet week and a week you go viral cost the same.
  • Not a share of your revenue. There is no advertising on your player, so there is nothing to split. What your station earns is yours.
  • Not for the control panel. The radio panel is included everywhere. It is not a tier and it is not an add-on.
  • Not for https. Secure streaming is standard on every plan. It is not sold separately, and a station opened today gets it in the first minute.
  • Not to stop. Close the station and the billing stops with it. There is no exit charge and no notice period.

The setup fee is not refundable, because it pays for building the account. The paid plans carry a three-day refund window on the subscription itself.

Upgrading

The free plan runs out in exactly three ways

Not on a timer. These are the only three walls, and each one has a symptom you will notice before you notice a limit.

The music stops when you close the laptop

The free plan has no storage at all, so there is nothing for Auto DJ to play from. Uploading anyway pushes the account over a zero quota and takes the stream down with it.

Auto DJ running hourly clocks you build, a library to fill, and four times the bitrate
Premium $39/mo

$390 a year — saves $78

  • 128 Kbps
  • 1 stream
  • 2,500 listeners at once
  • 500,000 listener hours a month
  • 20 GB storage
  • 5 DJ accounts
  • Auto DJ
  • DJs with their own logins and hours, and a studio in your browser
  • Full audience stats for 30 days, show by show
Get Premium

Every track arrives at a different volume

Premium plays each file at the level it was mastered at, so a quiet old record follows a loud new one and listeners reach for the dial. It also sends one stream to everyone, from a car on a weak signal to a hi-fi.

Broadcast loudness levelling, cue points, 320 Kbps, and two lighter streams for phones
Platinum $79/mo

$790 a year — saves $158

  • 320 Kbps
  • 3 streams
  • 5,000 listeners at once
  • 1.5 million listener hours a month
  • 100 GB storage
  • 20 DJ accounts
  • Auto DJ
  • Loudness levelling, cue points, song requests
  • Voice tracking, guest links, a backup source and seamless DJ handoff
  • Track and tune-out stats, traffic checks, exports, email reports, 90 days of history
Get Platinum

More than 5,000 people listen at once

Platinum, the largest plan, stops at 5,000 simultaneous listeners. That is a real ceiling, not a soft one, and a station that reaches it starts turning people away mid-broadcast.

As many listeners as you need, on a stream built for it
Enterprise Quoted

Priced on your peak, not a tier

  • Up to 320 Kbps
  • Custom streams
  • Storage sized to your library
  • Auto DJ
Tell us your numbers

Both paid plans bill monthly or yearly, and a year is two months free: $78 off Premium, $158 off Platinum. No setup fee on either — the $5 applies to the free plan only. Every plan carries the same secure stream URL, the same ad-free player and the same control panel — those are not tiers.

The machines

Two rooms, both ours

New York

Our east-coast floor, and the shorter path for listeners across the Americas.

Bucharest

Our Romanian floor, and the shorter path for listeners across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Say which one you want when you open the station and we will place you there. It is not a switch in the checkout, so if you say nothing you may land on either — ask and we will move you, at no charge, before you go on air.

These are not rented slices of somebody else's platform. Primcast builds and runs the hardware in both rooms, which is why the bandwidth is unmetered and never billed by the gigabyte: the port is ours to give away.

Straight answers

What people ask us before they open one

Is the free plan actually free, or is it a trial?

It is free, and it does not expire. There is one charge, the setup fee, taken once when the account is built, and after that a free station bills nothing for as long as you broadcast. Some of ours have been running for over a decade on that single payment.

Why is there a charge at all on a free plan?

Because a real server account gets built for you, and because a fee — even a small one — is what keeps the free tier from being farmed by people who will never broadcast. It is charged once, it is not refundable, and nothing follows it.

Can I schedule music to play while I am away?

No, and this is the one limit worth understanding before you start. Auto DJ plays from a library stored on the server, and the free plan has no storage at all — so there is nowhere to put one. Uploading anyway does not simply fail: it pushes the account past a zero quota and your stream stops. If you want music playing while you are away, you want Auto DJ and a paid plan.

Is there a cap on how many people tune in?

A thousand on the free plan, 2,500 on Premium and 5,000 on Platinum. Each is a real ceiling rather than a marketing number, and if you expect to pass five thousand, tell us and we will quote the station properly instead of letting you hit it live. Premium and Platinum also come with a monthly allowance of listener hours: 500,000 and 1.5 million.

What is a listener hour, and what happens when the month's run out?

One person listening for one hour. 500,000 of them is roughly 690 people tuned in around the clock for a whole month; 1.5 million is roughly 2,080. We email you at 80% and again at 100%. At 100%, anyone already listening keeps listening, and new listeners cannot tune in until the 1st of next month — or until you move from Premium to Platinum, which raises the allowance straight away. Nothing is ever added to your bill.

SHOUTcast or Icecast?

Icecast, to begin with: every station we build starts on it, and the order form has no question about server software. Support will move yours to SHOUTcast whenever you ask, inside Centova Cast, and it keeps the plan you chose at the price you already pay. People usually ask because their encoder only speaks SHOUTcast, or because they want a listing in the shoutcast.com directory.

Do I need my own website?

No. Every station gets a page with a working player on it, and the player embeds into a site you already have if you would rather. The stream link is https:// either way, which is what stops a modern browser refusing to play it inside a secure page.

What about music royalties?

They are yours to handle, and they depend on where you broadcast from and what you play — hosting a stream is not a licence to play recordings. We keep a plain-language summary, including the reduced schedules that apply to worship broadcasters, on our royalty fees page.

Can I move up later without losing the station?

Yes. The mount point, the panel and your listeners' link all survive an upgrade — what changes is the bitrate ceiling, the listener ceiling, the storage and the number of streams. Nobody has to re-tune anything.

Somebody out there will listen to whatever you put on

Open the station, connect the encoder, and find out. It is the same server and the same panel whether you ever pay us again or not.

Open a free station Ask us something first