I use podget, which is a 248 kB bash script. I really like it, and think it will meet your requirements:

• It’s designed to be called from cron
• It lets you sort your podcasts into categories
• It automatically organises the downloads into different directories based on these categories
• It’s been around since 2005 and is still maintained

From its description:

Podget is a simple podcast aggregator optimized for running as a scheduled background job (i.e. cron). It features support for downloading podcasts from RSS & ATOM XML feeds, for sorting the files into folders & categories, for importing URLs from iTunes PCAST files & OPML lists automatic M3U & ASX playlist creation, and automatic cleanup of old files.

It also features automatic UTF-16 conversion for podcasts hosted on MS Windows servers.

I have read so many posts like this, that try to explain why their company is a special case and why it could never happen to them, only to see the same thing happen again and again.

Tailscale are trying to insert themselves into the stack and become the go-to choice for this kind of networking. When their customers are dependent on it, of course they’ll start extracting rent and capturing as much as they can.

That’s their right, but it’s also a little condescending to pretend otherwise.

I host Synapse using this playbook. I can highly recommend it - the instructions are very clear and detailed and ongoing maintenance is straightforward too (just git pull and redeploy, and 5% of the time modify a deprecated variable).

As for how to delegate to a subdomain - that’s covered here. Basically - you set it up on matrix.example.eu and then have a “well known” file hosted at example.eu that tells other clients/servers where to look.

For services only I depend on, I have production-only. Since I can only inflict damage on myself, and can often work around problems.

For the XMPP server my friends and family also depend on, I have a dedicated nonprod VPS. My services are driven by ansible playbooks, so I’ll tweak the playbook with whatever change I want to make works in nonprod, before running the same playbook against prod.

Whenever there’s a new Debian Stable release, I’ll rebuild the servers completely, to try and prevent “drift” between the nonprod and prod versions (not that I change things often enough for this to become a big problem). This is also the big test of my backups, which so far haven’t been needed in a “real” emergency 🤞

I can highly recommend Mythic Beasts (UK).

There is no upsell or variable pricing and they make money by charging a flat rate on top of the cost from their supplier. See this blog post for more info

I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.