Changelog

Hourcast is a YouTube ads tool for podcasts and longform video content. It runs your episodes as in-feed ads in your own Google Ads account and puts your budget where the cost per completed hour is lowest.

1.3.2September 22, 2026

Improved: The budget-override notice now fires only when a campaign budget was genuinely edited in Google Ads. Four events used to produce an identical symptom — that edit, a campaign paused in Google Ads, a group budget changed in Hourcast, or a move the engine made itself — and only one of them is worth an email. Checked against fifty simulated accounts over sixty days before release.
Improved: Group budget entry now matches the precision the engine allocates in, so none of the budget you set is left unspent.
Fixed: A group budget can no longer be saved with a non-numeric value.

1.3.1September 19, 2026

New: Delivery monitoring on every email Hourcast sends. A message that bounces, is blocked, or is turned away is picked up the same day and acted on.
New: Quiet-account detection. If a trial starts and the dashboard is never opened, we are alerted and follow up — almost always it means a welcome email landed somewhere you did not look.
Improved: An alert about undelivered email, sent by email, is circular — the failure it reports is the failure that stops it arriving. Account-access alerts no longer depend on the channel they report on.

1.3.0July 28, 2026

New: A campaign that has not yet gathered enough completed hours to rank is no longer left waiting. It used to have to earn enough completed hours before the engine could rank it at all, which meant the campaigns that most needed help waited longest. It is now judged on what it has already proven, with budget moves kept deliberately small until the full picture arrives.
New: Audience Actions. Hourcast now shows which audience segments cost you the most per completed hour. Google gives no bid control over an audience segment — the only lever is keep or remove — so the bar for recommending removal sits far higher than for a bid change. Because a segment is shared, one change in Google Ads covers every ad group it runs in.
Improved: Age and gender Actions now work on every account, with no special targeting setup required.
Improved: “Refine targeting” is now Low performing segments — the section name says what is in it.
Improved: The pause list is ordered campaign, then ad group, then ad — matching Google Ads Editor, so you can work straight down it.
Improved: Three corrections to budget allocation, found by replaying the engine against a real account’s 120-day history over 1,200 simulated runs — each run re-checked against the rules the engine must never break. Group totals now hold exactly.

1.2.0July 19, 2026

New: Format protection. Hourcast optimizes in-feed placements only. If a campaign starts delivering anywhere else, it is detected automatically, marked on your dashboard, and taken out of optimization — mixed formats make a completed hour cost meaningless, and the engine will not act on a number it cannot stand behind. Detecting it reliably took rebuilding the format check from the ground up.
New: A campaign in that state stops gaining budget and hands it back to the healthy campaigns in its group, while still showing you exactly what to fix.
New: Second-account protection. If data starts arriving from a second Google Ads account, you are told which one and you choose what to keep.
New: Account self-repair. If dashboard access cannot be created the moment you subscribe, the system keeps trying on its own until it succeeds.
Improved: Billing reads exactly. Trial end dates, renewals, cancellations and failed payments all show the true state of your subscription, and Settings tells you plainly what happens when the trial ends.
Improved: Days affected by non-in-feed delivery were recalculated, so the history behind your numbers matches the way they are measured now.
Improved: Account security hardened across the dashboard.
Fixed: Completion counts under ten now show exactly.
Fixed: A running A/B test shows across its whole run in the activity log.
Fixed: Device bid Actions now compute correctly at the maximum reduction.

1.1.2July 3, 2026

New: A subscription panel in Settings showing your account’s exact status — trial, active, cancelled or expired — and the one action that matches it.
Improved: Account security — closed the routes that let automated scans discover user accounts.
Improved: A log-out item in the account menu, and submenus that stay open as you move to them.
Fixed: The Actions page no longer leaves an empty heading behind when you mark the last item in a group done.

1.1.1June 11, 2026

Improved: Every amount, on every page and in every email, is shown in the currency of your Google Ads account, with the symbol, separators and decimals that currency uses.
Improved: Shorter dashboard URLs. Existing links redirect automatically.
Improved: Charts and tables now render correctly at phone widths.
Fixed: Device bid Actions always propose a value Google Ads accepts.

1.1.0May 20, 2026

New: An Action that catches ads spending without a single completion, so a quiet drain does not run for weeks. A flat spend limit would have punished shows whose completions are simply expensive.
New: Campaigns that have just had new ads added are protected from losing budget while those ads are still finding their audience.
New: A next-step banner during setup that points at the one thing left to do.
Improved: The Actions email now shows the reasoning for every ad — what it spent, what it returned — and the expected effect of each bid change.
Improved: Campaign pages show at a glance whether a campaign is running, and long ad names no longer stretch the tables.
Improved: Deleting a campaign group leaves its campaigns running on their own budgets instead of switching them off.
Improved: Cost per Completed Hour explains itself when it cannot be shown yet — too little spend reads differently from no completions.
Fixed: Device bid limits are consistent across every Action that touches them.
Fixed: The email-frequency selector keeps your chosen days when you change frequency.

1.0.1May 3, 2026

New: A live sample dashboard for the whole trial — a full account’s worth of data, refreshed every day, so you can see exactly what Hourcast does before your own numbers arrive.
Improved: Fresh-content Actions hold back while you are already adding new ads to a campaign.
Improved: Clearer empty states — the Actions page says what it is waiting for.
Improved: Subscription details in Settings read live from billing.
Improved: Tax is handled at checkout, so the price shown is the price paid.

1.0.0April 23, 2026

Overview — spend, completed hours, and what a completed hour costs you.
Campaigns — every ad group, ad, device and audience, ranked by cost per completed hour.
Actions — the changes worth making next, each with the spend and completion figures behind it. Nothing reaches your ads without you.
Audiences — which audiences and demographics finish your episodes, and what each one costs.
Controls — campaign groups and the budget they share. Budget moves between the campaigns you group together, always inside the total you set.
A/B test — one Optimized campaign against one untouched Control campaign, side by side in your own account.
Activity log — a dated record of every budget change and every Action generated.
Settings — setup, subscription and email preferences.
Cost per Completed Hour — calculated for every campaign, ad group, ad, device, audience and demographic.
Email notifications — an Actions summary on the days you pick, plus alerts when data stops arriving or an ad needs attention.
Monthly summary — completed hours, spend, and what a completed hour cost you.
Setup in 10 minutes — one script, inside your own Google Ads account.
Long-form only — episodes under 7 minutes are refused by design.
Budget guardrails — your total is never raised, daily moves are capped, and new campaigns get protected learning time.
Currency — every amount is shown in the currency of your Google Ads account.