Coming soon to Google Play

Wake up to conversation.

An alarm clock that wakes you with your podcast instead of a beep. Press Listen on and it keeps playing, so the room doesn't go quiet. Once you're up, it's a proper podcast player.

Get on Android See how it works

Fires every time: even after a restart or in battery saver. The episode is on your phone before the alarm rings, so it plays from storage rather than streaming.

Podcast microphone
6:05
Alarmcast alarms screen showing three alarms, each with its own podcast or playlist

Before anything else

An alarm that plays a podcast sounds like it will let you down

That is the right instinct. A podcast lives on somebody else's server, and phones spend the night switching things off to save battery. Three things make it safe to point tomorrow morning at one.

✓The episode is on your phone before the alarm
✓It sets itself again after a restart
✓Four ways to ring, ending in a file that cannot go missing

What it survives, in detail

How it works

From podcast to alarm in three steps

1  Find your show

Browse 28 topic folders of hand-picked shows built into the app, or search the full podcast directory. Play an episode to try it, then subscribe. Everything you follow lands in your Library.

2  Set your alarm

Pick the time and days, then point the alarm at a show or at a playlist you built. Set the show to play its newest episode or to carry on where you left off. Volume, snooze and Gentle Wake belong to the alarm itself.

3  Wake up to it

The episode downloads in the half hour before the alarm and plays from your phone's storage the instant it fires. No streaming, no buffering. If the download couldn't finish, the alarm streams the episode instead, and a chime rings if that fails too.

Listen on

The room doesn't go quiet

A clock radio worked because somebody was already talking when you opened your eyes. An alarm's whole job is to stop, and the moment it stops the house is quieter than it was before it started.

Press Listen on and the alarm ends properly, then the player picks the same episode up at the same second, at the volume the alarm was already at, with the rest of the show queued behind it. Carry on over breakfast, and tomorrow's alarm knows how far you got.

  • Same episode, same secondThe playhead crosses over exactly. No restarting, no hunting for your place.
  • Volume doesn't jumpThe player matches the loudness the alarm was already at.
  • The queue comes tooThe player rebuilds the full list of episodes, not just the one you woke to.
  • Tomorrow follows onOn a show set to carry on, where you stopped is where the next alarm starts. Requires Premium.

Reliability first

The alarm fires every time

An alarm that streams at fire time is a bet on your morning network. Alarmcast doesn't gamble. The episode is already on your phone when the alarm fires, and everything else in the app serves one rule, which is that it wakes you up whatever Android switched off while you slept.

✓Survives reboots
✓Fires in deep Doze
✓Beats battery optimization
✓Rings on the lock screen
✓Never streams first
✓Chime backup, always

The hard part

A ringtone is a file that ships inside the app.
An episode is a URL that might not be there.

That difference is most of the work. A ringtone can't go offline, get pulled, arrive half-downloaded or turn out to be 200 MB. A podcast alarm has to survive a list of things a normal alarm has never heard of. A few of the ones we found:

9.4%

Directories go stale

Nearly one episode in eleven has a different download link in the podcast directory than in the publisher's own feed. So we always ask the publisher.

Hotel Wi-Fi

Not everything that downloads is audio

Captive Wi-Fi hands back its login page as a perfectly valid-looking file. We check the bytes really are audio before trusting them.

Every ½ sec

"Playing" isn't the same as audible

Media players report success before any sound comes out. We watch the audio position actually move, and move on if it stalls.

Samsung

Some phones don't play along

Samsung quietly withholds the restart signal alarms depend on. We found out the hard way and routed around it, so the alarm re-arms in the first minutes after the restart, before you ever unlock the phone.

And when it all goes wrong anyway

Downloaded episode → Live stream → Your chime → Built-in tone

Four rungs, each one taking over automatically. The last is a file inside the app that cannot fail to exist. Something wakes you.

See it in action

An alarm clock and a player

Three tabs: Alarms, Library, Discover. Every screen does one job, and setting tomorrow's wake-up takes seconds.

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Alarms screen with three alarms, each showing its podcast or playlist
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Discover screen showing the browse-by-topic grid of podcast folders
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The Gems folder, showing hand-picked podcasts with their cover art
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Library screen showing playlists and subscribed podcasts
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A playlist mixing episodes from several different podcasts, in order
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The library player with scrubber, speed and sleep timer
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The alarm ringing, with snooze, dismiss and Listen on
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Gentle Wake screen, with the bird

Your alarms, each pointed at its own show or playlist, with its own days and wake style.

Built as an alarm clock

An alarm clock first, a podcast player second

Every setting here exists to make one minute of the day work. What is left over happens to be a good podcast app for the other twenty-three hours.

Ready before you wake

Point an alarm at a show and Alarmcast downloads the episode in the half hour before it fires, Wi-Fi first, mobile data as backup. When the alarm goes off, audio starts instantly from storage. No streaming, no buffering.

A running order for the morning

Build a playlist from any show you follow: a five-minute news brief, then the long one you actually lie in bed for. Point an alarm at it and it works through the list across mornings, picking up where it got to rather than starting again. Up to 20 episodes, drag to reorder. Building playlists is a Premium feature, and one you have already built keeps waking you either way.

A Library built for alarms

Subscribe to the shows you love and point any alarm at one. Open a show and it marks what you've played, what's playing now, and the exact episode your alarm will start from. No surprises at 6 am.

Newest, or carry on

Each show is set one of two ways: always wake to the newest episode, or continue a series where you left off. On newest it skips episodes you have already heard, so a lie-in on Monday does not cost you Tuesday. Set once per show, on every tier.

Then it gets out of alarm mode

Once you're up, the library player takes over: scrubber, playback speed, sleep timer, episode notes, and one-tap play on every episode in your Library. It rolls into the next episode on its own when one ends.

Start from a template

Six ready-made ways in: Start with the News, Gems, Gentle Start, Learn Something, Continue Where You Left Off, and Laugh Yourself Awake. Open one and it offers hand-picked shows. Choose a show and the alarm editor opens with it already set, so all you add is the time.

A small bird perched calmly on a branch

One more thing

Gentle Wake eases you in

Not a morning person? With Gentle Wake, birdsong fades up from silence in the minutes before your alarm, so the podcast lands on ears that are already half awake. Five ambient beds to pick from, layered on an alarm that still fires exactly on time.

Discover

3,961 shows, already sorted

A search box only helps once you already know the name. Alarmcast ships with a catalogue of hand-picked shows across 28 topic folders, built into the app, so browsing works before you've typed anything. Search reaches everything else.

Some folders are about a subject. Some are about a mood.

Which matters more than usual at 6 am. Gentle Starts exists because not everyone wants breaking news before their feet touch the floor.

Gentle Starts Gems News & Current Affairs Comedy True Crime Tech Education & History Animals & Nature Sports Cult Classics Complete Series Listen with Kids + 16 more, and you pick which ones you see

Pricing

Free to start, with more when you want it

Every plan wakes you exactly the same way. Reliability is never behind a paywall. Paying removes ads and adds control over what plays and where it starts.

Free

Starter

Free, with ads

The whole alarm, free. Ads sit in the app, never on the alarm.

  • Up to 2 alarms
  • Latest or carry-on, per show
  • Gentle Wake & volume fade-in
  • The library player: speed, sleep timer, scrubber
  • Skips episodes you've already heard
  • Skip-back 15s & built-in chime fallback
  • No ads on alarm screens, ever
No subscription One-off

Ad-free

$4.99 once · no subscription

Removes every ad in the app, for good.

  • No banner on Alarms, Library, Discover or the player
  • Unlimited alarms
  • Everything in Starter
  • One payment, no account, no renewal
  • Restore it on a new phone anytime
Most popular Subscription

Premium

$11.99/yr (about $1/mo) or $1.99/mo · 21-day free trial

Ad-free too, plus control over what plays.

  • Everything in Ad-free, including unlimited alarms
  • Build playlists from any show you follow, walked across mornings
  • Resume mid-episode, even days later
  • Skip forward & jump between episodes, while the alarm plays and in the player

Not a subscription person? A one-time $29.99 Lifetime purchase unlocks everything in Premium, forever. And a playlist you've already built keeps waking you whether or not the subscription is still running: Premium gates making them, never playing them.

Why there's a Premium plan

The alarm came first: the scheduling, the download ahead of time, the fallback chain. That part is done, it's free, and it works identically on every plan. We'd rather someone use Alarmcast for years without paying us than ship an alarm that quietly doesn't ring.

Premium is the listening layer built on top: picking a long episode back up days later, skipping around or jumping to another episode while the alarm is still ringing, and building playlists that mix shows. Live playback controls on an alarm that must never fail was the hardest thing in the app to build, and it's what the subscription pays for.

The Alarmcast team

The Alarmcast bird, singing

Wake up to something worth hearing.

Alarmcast is in the final stretch before Google Play. Leave your email and we'll send exactly one message, on launch day.

Notify me at launch Explore features

Or say hello at hello@alarmcast.app