Pocket Casts MCP Server

An MCP server that connects AI assistants to your Pocket Casts account. Browse your subscriptions, read episode details, and retrieve transcripts — with automatic transcription via AssemblyAI when no native transcript exists.

Built with Bun and FastMCP. Deployable to Railway or any Docker host.

Multi-user. Each person connects their own Pocket Casts account through a one-time enrollment, gets a private access token, and only ever sees their own podcasts. No shared account, and the server never stores anyone's password.

Tools

Related MCP server: Your Spotify MCP Server

How auth works

1. A user opens the server root in a browser and submits their own Pocket Casts email + password (one time).

2. The server logs in to Pocket Casts to verify the credentials, then stores only the resulting session tokens — encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM — keyed to a freshly minted bearer token.

3. The password is discarded immediately and never stored. The bearer token is shown to the user once.

4. The user puts that bearer token in their MCP client. Every request is routed to that user's own Pocket Casts session; tokens auto-refresh and are re-encrypted in place.

Bearer tokens are stored only as SHA-256 hashes, so a database leak yields no usable credentials without the ENCRYPTION_KEY.

Enrolling

Web form (recommended): open the server's root URL (e.g. https://your-app.railway.app/), enter your Pocket Casts login, and copy the access token it returns.

Terminal: with the server running,

ENROLL_URL=https://your-app.railway.app bun run login

Delete your credentials: either run the delete-my-account tool from your assistant, or:

curl -X DELETE https://your-app.railway.app/creds -H "Authorization: Bearer <your-token>"

Connecting an MCP client

Point your MCP client at:

https://your-app.railway.app/mcp

Authenticate with either:

• Authorization: Bearer <your-token> header, or

• ?api_key=<your-token> query parameter

Local development

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.3+

• A Postgres database (DATABASE_URL)

• A Pocket Casts account (Plus required for API access)

Run

Create a .env file:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@localhost:5432/pocketcasts
ENCRYPTION_KEY=<output of: openssl rand -base64 32>
ASSEMBLYAI_API_KEY=your-assemblyai-key    # optional, enables transcription fallback

Then:

bun install
bun run start          # serves enrollment form + MCP endpoint on PORT (default 3001)
bun run login          # enroll yourself from the terminal

Deploy to Railway

1. Add the Postgres plugin to your project — it injects DATABASE_URL automatically.

2. Set the environment variables below.

3. The included Dockerfile is Railway-ready (bun run index.ts).

How transcripts work

1. Checks for Pocket Casts-generated transcripts first

2. Falls back to RSS-sourced transcripts if available

3. If neither exists and ASSEMBLYAI_API_KEY is set, submits the audio URL directly to AssemblyAI for transcription (no file download required)