Two Services That Remove Ads From Podcasts

Here are two services that remove ads from podcasts:

Quick Answer

Herd is a standalone, ad‑free podcast player app for Apple devices with built‑in smart ad skipping, comments, and offline support. Pricing is $4.99/month or $29.99/year.
ZeroAds is an AI “middleware” that removes podcast ads and gives you a clean RSS feed you can use in any normal podcast app. Price is listed as “$5.99/month” forever. ZeroAds say they share part this price with the podcasters.

You paste a public podcast RSS into ZeroAds, it transcribes the audio, detects sponsor reads and dynamic ads using AI, cuts them out with FFmpeg, and publishes a new “clean” RSS feed.
ZeroAds works well, but requires a little bit of work to initially create the feeds.
You then subscribe to that clean feed in any regular podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, etc.). I outline the benefits of Pocket Casts player in this post.
Reported removal is ~90%+ of host‑read and dynamic ads, with a bias toward not cutting real content.
Pricing is roughly in the $5.99–$7.99/month range.
ZeroAds shares part of your subscription with podcasters via a creator compensation pool based on listening time — details here.

Herd is an iOS/macOS podcast player that offers “true ad‑free listening” for all podcasts by identifying external, dynamically inserted, and host‑read ads via its own AI detection system.
It’s a full‑featured client: audio and video support, comments and discussion, autoplay, queue management, downloads and offline play, and progress sync across devices.
The app is free with optional premium subscriptions, but the App Store listing notes data linked to you (contact info) and data not linked to you (location, identifiers, usage, diagnostics).
Pricing is $4.99/month or $29.99/year.