The Podcaster starter kit is one of the good ones. Tell Cantrip your show's name and what it's about, and it builds four real pages (Home, Episodes, About, Contact) plus an Episodes collection seeded with three sample episodes. Each one gets a real AI-written title, teaser, and show notes pulled from what you actually typed in, not generic filler text. That part works exactly like it should.
What doesn't: the homepage ships with a row of buttons under a "Listen & Subscribe" heading, labeled Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and RSS Feed. Every single one points at a literal #. Click any of them on launch day and the page just jumps to its own top. Nobody wired those wrong. Nobody wired them at all. They're placeholders waiting for your real show URLs, and nothing in the setup flow flags that they're still sitting there empty.
Same story shows up again on each individual episode. Open one in the editor and there's an "External Link" field, sitting right where you'd expect to paste that episode's page on Spotify or Apple. Paste it in, save it, and it does nothing. Everywhere else in Cantrip, turning on a collection's own detail pages turns that external-link option off, since a post can only send visitors one place. The Podcaster kit's setup turns both on at once. Your episodes still get real, working pages either way, but the built-in page always wins, so whatever you typed into External Link just sits in the database, saved and quietly ignored. Want an episode to point at its real home on your podcast host instead? Put that link in the show notes text. That one actually renders and works.
There's no audio player anywhere in this either, and that's a design choice, not a bug. Episodes are text and images: show notes, a featured photo, nothing that plays sound. Cantrip doesn't host your audio file or embed a player from Spotify or Apple. The starter kit builds the website around your podcast, not a place to upload the podcast itself.
None of that makes it a bad starting point. The pages are real, the writing is real, and the Episodes list works exactly like a clean blog would, which is honestly most of what a podcast website needs to do. Just don't launch assuming those subscribe buttons are live. Open the Links section on your homepage and swap in your actual show URLs before you tell anyone the site's up, and skip the per-episode External Link field. It looks like it does something. It doesn't.