All signal, zero noise.
Why I built The Chonkerton
3 to 5 fresh stories, narrated. Free with audio ads, or $5/mo ad-free.
I wanted a news habit that respected my time, and I couldn't find one. So I built it.
Here's the gap I kept falling into. Podcasts are great company, but by the time an episode lands it's often days stale, produced on someone else's schedule, about whatever the host felt like covering. The news apps are the opposite problem: bottomless feeds engineered to keep you scrolling, every headline tuned to provoke a tap. One is too slow. The other never lets you leave. Neither is built for someone who just wants to know what happened and get on with their day.
What The Chonkerton does instead
It pulls fresh stories, summarizes them, and reads them to you in a short, personalized briefing, on demand, whenever you want it. The whole thing is organized around curation by subtraction: you tell it the topics you care about, and it leaves the rest out. No infinite scroll, no autoplay rabbit hole, no engagement traps. When the briefing ends, you're done. That's the feature.
A few things I refuse to compromise on
- The AI is disclosed, always. The summaries and the voices are AI-generated, and I say so plainly. Hidden AI is a trust tax I'm not willing to charge you.
- We only use sources we're allowed to use. Public feeds, explicit author consent, public domain. We never scrape paywalled work. A paid subscription is a reading right, not a redistribution right.
- The free tier is genuinely free. Unlimited listening, paid for by a few short audio ads between stories. If the ads bug you, $5/mo removes them. No bait, no locked core feature.
- No dark patterns. Cancel in two clicks. Delete your account and your data yourself, whenever you want. I built the off-ramp before I built the marketing.
Who's behind it
The Chonkerton is built and run by one person, me, under Conch Labs LLC. I go by Damlab. I'm not raising a round or chasing a billion users; I'm building a small, honest product I'd actually want to use, and hoping enough people want the same thing to keep it alive. If that's you, the best way to support it is simply to listen.
Damlab
Conch Labs LLC