What You'll Get With own.audio — and What You'll Pay For
September 28, 2026
We get asked the same questions a lot: which apps, what does it cost, what’s the catch, and what happens to my files. This is the whole answer in one place — what own.audio will give you when it launches, and exactly what you’ll pay for.
The short version: free apps on every screen, your own files always, and one bill — for the storage your library uses.
Free, native apps on every screen
Every own.audio app is free, with every feature in it. There’s no premium tier, no ads and no “pro” unlock.
They’re also native: built with each platform’s own tools — SwiftUI on Apple devices, Jetpack Compose on Android, WinUI on Windows — rather than one web page wrapped up to look like an app. That’s more work for us, and it’s why the apps feel at home on each device: the lock-screen controls, widgets and voice assistants you expect are there because the apps are built the way each platform intends.
| Where | What you’ll get | Status |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone | Three focused apps: Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts | In development |
| iPad | The same three apps with iPad layouts | In development |
| Apple TV | One app with music, audiobooks and podcasts | Planned |
| Android | Three apps: Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts | In development |
| Mac | One app to listen and to look after the whole family library | In development |
| Windows | The same, native on Windows | In development |
| Linux | A desktop app with the same management tools | Planned |
| Any browser | The web app, nothing to install | In development |
Why three apps on the phone instead of one? Because an audiobook, a podcast and an album want different things from a player — chapters and a sleep timer, episodes and a queue, gapless albums and an equalizer. One app that tries to do all three usually does each of them a little badly. You can see where every app stands on the roadmap.
Your library as a folder, like iCloud Drive or OneDrive
On a computer, own.audio shows up where your files already live. On the Mac, your library appears in Finder next to iCloud Drive, using the same system Apple built for iCloud Drive and OneDrive. On Windows, it appears in File Explorer the way OneDrive does, using the same Windows technology.
It behaves the way you’d expect from those services. Everything is listed, but a song or a book only downloads when you open it, so a 200 GB library doesn’t fill a 256 GB laptop. Mark a folder to keep on the computer and it stays there, offline.
The Mac folder is built and working in our test builds; Windows is being finished now.
Your original files, always
This is the part we care about most. What you upload is what you get back — the same file, bit for bit.
- No DRM. Nothing is locked to our apps.
- No re-encoding. We don’t convert your FLAC to something smaller or your MP3 to something else. The apps play your files as they are.
- Downloading is free. Getting your files back — into the folder on your computer, onto your phone, or all of it at once — is never charged. There’s no bandwidth fee and no “export” button hidden behind a plan.
If you ever leave, your music and audiobooks leave with you, in the format you brought them in. A library you can’t take with you isn’t really yours.
Offline, and in the car
Every app can keep music, audiobooks and episodes on the device for when there’s no signal — a flight, a tunnel, a holiday cottage. On the web, you can keep music playlists offline in the browser too; we wrote up how that works on the iPhone.
In the car, the phone apps will work with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, so the family’s audiobook or the road-trip playlist is on the car’s screen, not someone’s lap.
What you’ll pay: storage, and nothing else unless you ask
own.audio has one price: $0.05 per GB per month for the space your library takes up. It’s one bill for the whole family, not per person, and there are no plans to choose between.
| Library | Storage | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 songs | ~8 GB | ~$0.40 |
| 5,000 songs and 30 audiobooks | ~48 GB | ~$2.40 |
| A big family archive | ~200 GB | ~$10.00 |
You’ll always see the exact daily and monthly cost before it’s charged, and the date your credit runs out. The first 100 people on the waitlist get $5 of credit to start. Try your own numbers with the calculator on the home page, or read why paying for storage beats paying a subscription.
Optional extras, paid only when you use them
Two features cost real money to run, because they use AI services by the character. Rather than raise everyone’s price to cover them, they’re paid separately — only by the people who use them, only when they use them, and only for what they actually use. The price is shown before you start, and it’s taken from your credit.
- Narrate a book. Have a book as text but not as audio? own.audio can turn it into an audiobook read by a natural-sounding AI voice, and put it in your library. The price depends on the length of the book.
- Translate a podcast episode. Pick an episode and a language, and get a translated, narrated version in your library. It works on episodes that publish a transcript. In our own test, a German translation of an 8,570-character transcript cost 90 cents; we wrote about it in hear any podcast episode in your language.
No subscription, no bundle. If you never use them, you never pay for them.
And the rest of what’s in the box
- One library for the whole family, with a role for each member and parents deciding what younger children can hear. Invite family with an email, a link or a QR code.
- Smart playlists built from what your family actually plays — without an AI model.
- A proper music player: gapless playback, crossfade, an equalizer and lyrics.
- Audiobook and podcast basics done right: it remembers where you stopped on every device, with playback speed, bookmarks and a sleep timer.
- Siri, widgets and lock-screen controls where the platform supports them.
- A 30-day trash, so deleting something by accident isn’t the end of it.
- Your choice of player. If you already love a music app, we’re building compatibility with OpenSubsonic apps so it can connect to your own.audio library.
When can you have it?
own.audio isn’t available yet. The apps, the storage and everything above are being built and tested now, and the launch happens when the iPhone apps are ready — the roadmap shows where each one is.
If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for, join the waitlist. We’ll email you once, when it’s ready.