And that sucks for them, but it is also what the service is. It’s a cheap way to funnel people through the Podcasts app and generate more services revenue for Apple; you can’t even really call it a podcast host by any reasonable definition. Spotify’s service is about funneling people through the Spotify app to sell subscriptions and ads. YouTube’s service is basically the same. It’s a legitimate service that they signed up for that if you know what you’re getting into probably isn’t the worst deal.

Total crap though for podcast listeners, and also if you didn’t check out the service before committing to it. Sorry for your prospective customer, hopefully your post helps keep others out of this lobster trap.

Isn’t that going to be pretty inevitable since we’re talking about subscription billing?

If the user is having trouble migrating off Apple's hosting, they'd still have trouble migrating to a different host. Uploading hundreds of episodes and all the corresponding tagging/metadata is a pain no matter what.