Hello everyone. At the moment, I am loving working on Living Blindfully as my full-time job. This is why you are seeing some significant new features rolling out. Your Living Blindfully Plus memberships, and the support of our sponsors, is making this possible and I am truly grateful for everyone’s support.
Since we rebranded to Living Blindfully in April 2023, the enhancement I have been asked for the most is the ability to subscribe to Living Blindfully Plus directly in Apple Podcasts. As of today, you can do this as well as, rather than instead of, the method we have always used. I hope you’ll read this post carefully, as I’d like to explain the pros and cons of activating a Living Blindfully Plus membership via Apple Podcasts, versus using Pinecast which remains our preferred method.
We think for most users, Pinecast remains the best option because:
- You can listen to your premium content on any app or device you like. If it plays podcasts, Living Blindfully Plus via Pinecast will work with it.
- You can even have your subscription on multiple devices, such as your desktop, laptop, Victor Reader Stream and your favourite iOS app, including Apple Podcasts. No need to stick to one device whenever you want to hear Living Blindfully.
- Using Pinecast, you can choose what you pay for your membership. Money’s tight for many of us, while others may wish to support us generously. Using Pinecast, you set the price of your membership. Adjust it up or down whenever you want.
Here are the benefits of becoming a member of Living Blindfully Plus through Apple Podcasts.
- Subscribing via Apple Podcasts is familiar and easy.
- The subscription is billed to your Apple ID.
- You can check or cancel it any time using the usual method for all your other Apple subscriptions.
- With Apple Podcasts, we give you the option of paying yearly rather than monthly if you’d like.
- You get a machine-generated transcript as part of your Plus subscription through Apple Podcasts. While nowhere near as accurate as our human-generated version, this is a way to get a transcript early.
There are some downsides of using Apple Podcasts.
- You can only take advantage of your membership on the devices logged into your Apple ID, and with Apple’s own apps. This means that if you sometimes listen to podcasts on other apps or devices, such as a Victor Reader Stream, Overcast, Castro or PocketCasts, your Living Blindfully Plus subscription won’t be available to you.
- What you pay is not flexible. The price is set in each country for monthly and annual subscriptions. If you’d like to pay more to support us, or you find the price too high, you would be better using the more flexible Pinecast option.
- Finally, Living Blindfully keeps much less of the revenue when you subscribe through Apple Podcasts than we do from the Pinecast option. So when you use Pinecast, more of what you pay goes to supporting us. This has influenced the pricing we’ve set for Living Blindfully Plus in Apple Podcasts.
If you’d like to become a Living Blindfully Plus member through Apple Podcasts, here’s what you do.
These instructions apply to Apple Podcasts for iPhone and iPad. If you use a Mac or Windows, hopefully these instructions will be sufficient to help you subscribe on those platforms.
- Using iPhone, open the Podcasts app. The simplest way to do this is to say to Siri, “Open Podcasts”.
- Find the Search tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and double-tap to select it.
- Once in the Search field, double-tap to activate the text field and type, or dictate, Living Blindfully.
- As you type, the search results will update. Swipe right, and you should find the Living Blindfully show. Double-tap to select it.
- On the Living Blindfully screen, swipe right and you will eventually find reference to Living Blindfully Plus. You can get a 14-day free trial of Living Blindfully Plus.
- An important note. Apple Podcasts defaults to the yearly subscription. VoiceOver will confirm that this is selected. If you would prefer the monthly option, you can double-tap it. Unfortunately, VoiceOver will still tell you that the yearly option is selected, but in fact the monthly option does get selected after you double-tap it. I have reported this accessibility bug to Apple, and we hope it is addressed.
- Once you confirm your subscription, you will need to use Touch ID, the Side Button, or your password to finalise the purchase. Apple will send you an email confirming the subscription.
- You can cancel the subscription any time from within the subscriptions section of Apple’s Settings App.
To find out more about Living Blindfully Plus, including comprehensive instructions for making the most of our flexible Pinecast subscription method on whatever app or device you have, please visit https://LivingBlindfully.com/plus
To everyone who supports Living Blindfully, thank you so much. If you’re considering doing so, thank you too. We work hard every week to earn your listenership and support with quality content.