Local radio without the transmitter.

Keep everything that makes community radio matter. Lose everything that makes it exhausting.

Community radio runs on love and one volunteer who knows how the streaming server works. When that volunteer moves house, the station wobbles. Everyone who has been near a community station knows this person, and knows the fear.

The mission was never the infrastructure. The mission is the local voices: the Sunday gardening phone-in, the sixth-former with the drum and bass show, the councillor squirming through a proper interview. The infrastructure is just the tax you pay to have them. Staircase's job is to make that tax disappear.

What disappears

• The server cupboard. Stream, studio, website, backups: all run for you, monitored around the clock. Nightly backups you can restore yourself.
• The licence anxiety of FM. You're on the internet, the apps, the smart speakers. Alexa counts as a radio in more kitchens than FM does now.
• The training bottleneck. Presenters broadcast from home in a browser. A new volunteer's first show needs a login and a headset, not a key to the building and three induction sessions.
• The single point of failure. If nobody shows up, playlists play. The station simply does not go silent.

What gets better than FM ever was

You know your audience for the first time. Live listener counts, a map of where they are, what they listen on, which shows pull. Grant applications love numbers, and now you have them.

The audience talks back. Station chat, song requests, audio shout-outs recorded from a phone, competitions with a spin-the-wheel draw. And a proper audience list showing how each person found you and when a DJ last chatted with them.

Every show gets a second life. Slots record automatically. Listen again on the website, podcast feeds per show, highlights pushed to Mixcloud. The gardening phone-in becomes a back catalogue.

Volunteers are manageable. A recruitment form for new presenters, per-DJ permissions, messages with read receipts so "I never saw it" retires, and a schedule that enforces itself: presenters can only broadcast in their own slots.

The money conversation

£49/month, flat, everything included, no per-listener streaming costs eating the fundraising. That's less than most stations pay for streaming alone, before the website hosting and app developer even join the spreadsheet. Quiet year? Pause for £15/month and everything is kept exactly as you left it. You just can't broadcast until you switch back on.