Switching audio provider without losing your audio: the question you forget at signing

When you pick a tool to add audio to a site, you compare voices, prices, integration. You almost never ask what happens the day you want to leave. Yet that is the question that reveals the most about a provider, because a vague answer often hides a lock-in. Here is ours, as concrete as we can make it, on what a customer takes when leaving WeDispatch. We won't name anyone and won't compare anything: we only describe what our own product allows, and what it does not.

The audio files: yours, and downloadable

An audio produced with us is a standard MP3 file, playable anywhere, with no proprietary format. It isn't held hostage inside a player. From the player as from "My audios", the download button serves the article's MP3 as an attachment, from our own domain, so the browser saves it without leaving the page. It is the file of the article's current version, the one your listeners hear.

Two honest clarifications. First, downloading obeys your account and site setting: if you've turned it off for your visitors, no URL reopens it through a side door, but you, the account holder, retrieve your files. Second, retrieval is article by article: there is no single button today that packs your whole history into one archive. For a site of a few dozen articles, it's an afternoon's work; for a large corpus, it's a real job, and we'd rather say so than suggest a one-click export that doesn't exist. It's the same candour we hold on how long it really takes to add audio to an existing blog: a volume is a volume.

The texts: they were already yours

This is the simplest point, and the most important. The text of your articles was never ours. It lives in your CMS, your WordPress, your database. We read it to produce audio; we don't hold it on your behalf. Leaving us therefore loses you nothing on the content side: your articles stay where they have always been. That follows directly from how the plugin installs, without touching your theme or rewriting your content.

The podcast feed: the real reversibility question

This is where the answer turns nuanced, and where an honest provider has to be too. If you've turned your site into a podcast, your episodes are delivered by an RSS feed. That feed is served from an address on our side. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Deezer don't store your episodes: they read that address regularly and display what it contains. The upside is described in our piece on turning your news site into an automatic podcast; the trade-off belongs here.

The trade-off is that the feed lives at our address. The day you leave, that address stops serving your episodes, and the platforms, re-reading it, no longer find anything new. Your subscribers don't vanish at once, but your show stops being fed. To keep them, you have to republish your episodes under a new feed elsewhere and, depending on the platform, signal the feed's change of address. The files you have already retrieved, so nothing is truly lost at bottom: it's the distribution channel that must be rebuilt, not the content. It's a real limit, common to every feed host, and we'd rather name it than bury it. You can, at any time, see and manage your feeds from the RSS feed feature in your account.

What doesn't follow you, and that's normal

Let's be complete. What you don't take are the settings specific to our tool: your pronunciation fixes, your player templates, your styling, your listening stats. These are objects of our product, not data transferable to another, and no provider will hand them back in a form reusable elsewhere, because they only mean anything inside the tool that created them. It's fair to know that before signing, not on the day you leave.

Why we answer this unasked question

Because reversibility isn't a contract detail, it's a trust test. A tool that gives your files back, that never held your texts, and that tells you plainly where the friction is (the article-by-article export, the feed to rebuild) is a tool you can leave. That is precisely what makes the trial risk-free: you commit nothing you can't take back. Our WordPress page describes the way in; this article describes the way out, because both should be clear.

Try it knowing you can walk back out

The plugin downloads and installs with no commitment, and your files stay yours. Run the test on a few articles, listen to the result, and keep in mind that the exit is as open as the entrance.

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