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Mostly about one thing: why this runs on your own computer instead of just being a website you sign up for.
The short version: the install exists to keep your inbox out of our hands by default. If you'd rather hand that part to us for convenience, that option is coming — but it was never going to be the only option.
Because that's what keeps your inbox private, not because we didn't get around to building a signup page. When you run CatchUpCast self-hosted, there is no CatchUpCast server anywhere in the path between your Gmail and the AI provider that reads it. Your Gmail App Password and your provider keys are typed into your own local Admin Console, encrypted at rest, and stored in a Docker volume on hardware you control. Your email is read, extracted, and summarized entirely by accounts you created and pay directly — Google, Anthropic, whoever you chose. We're simply never in that loop. The install step is the mechanism that makes that true, not an inconvenience on the way to it.
The install itself is a few minutes — download a script, double-click it, done. What actually takes time is creating accounts with whichever AI providers you're trusting with your inbox, and that step exists no matter who builds the software, self-hosted or not. The lowest-touch version (email digest, Gmail + one AI key) runs about ten minutes start to finish; see the install guide's setup comparison for the full breakdown, including the longer path if you also want a narrated podcast feed.
Yes: cost control. Because you're calling the AI providers directly with your own key, you pay their retail price with nothing added on top, and you get to choose how much you spend. Pick a cheaper voice tier, use Gemini's free-tier-friendly pricing instead of Claude, tune batch size — it's your account, your dial to turn. Measured, typical usage runs $3-6/month for the AI summarization, TTS narration is often $0 inside Google's free tier, and audio storage runs a few dollars at most. There's no markup to shave down, because there's no middleman taking a cut of the request.
You can't — not because the field stops you from typing it, but because saving it is rejected. The source label field still lets you type any real label, including a brand-new one that doesn't exist in Gmail yet (it gets created for you, same as always), with suggestions from your existing labels once Gmail is connected. Inbox just isn't among those suggestions, and typing it anyway gets turned away with an explanation: Inbox (and Gmail's other built-in folders — All Mail, Sent, Spam, Drafts) mixes newsletters with personal mail, receipts, and spam that slipped through, exactly the kind of far-bigger-than-intended batch worth ruling out rather than just capping the cost of. For a real, dedicated label that still ends up bigger than expected (a shared folder with years of backlog, say), three separate settings bound the damage — how many emails one digest includes, how long any single email can be before it's shortened, and how large the combined batch can get — all tunable on the Settings page. Anything a cap leaves out just waits for a later run, and you get an email if one ever actually gets hit. Worth also setting an actual spending limit with your AI provider as a second layer — see the install guide's cost section for the real difference between Anthropic's hard spend limits and Google Cloud's alert-only budgets.
Yes — that's what the hosted subscription track is for, currently limited to a small invite list while we finish testing it. It's the same install, the same local app; the difference is what you connect on the Credentials page. Instead of your own provider accounts, you connect to CatchUpCast's hosted service, and we hold the provider relationship (and its cost) instead of you. It's built on the same privacy boundary as the self-hosted path, not a looser one: the hosted service is designed to never store your email content or the digest text it produces — both exist only for the length of the single request that builds your digest, then they're gone. Nothing about your inbox is logged or kept afterward. (The one thing that is retained, if you choose the podcast format, is the narrated audio file itself — for 14 days, only so your podcast app has something to fetch.)
Self-hosted: nothing, ever — there's no CatchUpCast server in the picture at all, so there's nothing for us to see. Hosted: only what's needed to generate one digest, and only for as long as that one request takes to run — enforced directly in the service's code, not just promised in a policy page.
Both, without reinstalling anything. Email versus podcast is one setting (Delivery mode) on the Admin Console's Settings page. Self-hosted versus the hosted subscription is just a matter of which credentials you've connected on the Credentials page — the app itself doesn't change.
It appears as CATCHUPCAST. The business behind it is P3 Digital Services LLC, so your bank may show that name alongside it. If you see either and don't recognize it, that's this subscription — please email support before disputing it with your bank, and we'll sort it out faster than a chargeback will.
Your feed keeps working and your existing episodes stay available for 14 days, then age out as they normally would. Nothing disappears from your podcast app the moment you cancel — you just stop getting new episodes.
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