Do you use docker for anything else self hosted? You should give it a try. I literally had not heard of grocy till I read your post but I self host other things with docker. I googled them, visited their github looked at their docker instructions - theirs downloading a docker compose file and lsio’s which gave a run option rather than compose.
I pulled up an ssh to my server from my phone and literally entered the run command from here just modified to have my preferred storage path.
docker run -d \
--name=grocy \
-e PUID=1000 \
-e PGID=1000 \
-e TZ=Etc/UTC \
-p 9283:80 \
-v ~/.config/grocy:/config \
--restart unless-stopped \
lscr.io/linuxserver/grocy:latest```
I then opened my browser to http://ip:9283 and was prompted with a username and password. I googled and found out the default is admin/admin. I now have grocy temporarily running on my server. If I want to run it permanently I'd include it in my existing docker-compose stack or create a new one with just it in it.
I understand it's frustrating and you may not want to use grocy after all and someone might have a good alternative, but getting to terms with docker will make your self hosting life much easier - it took me longer to type this post than it took me to get grocy up and running with docker.
Thanks for the recommendation, will give that a further look.
I have played with Pinchflat as mentioned by another poster. I’ve found that some of the ones that aren’t on YouTube, you can use AudioBookShelf or similar in conjunction with a vpn set to a non core country for the podcast, you can either remove or at least greatly reduce the ad inserts.
Have an experiment with that, I use a gluetun docker and link my ABS docker to that.