I have a Bluetooth headband set of headphones which I wear almost permanently while doing the housework and when walking or biking to church or to the village, with podcasts on all the time The quality doesn't have to be so good if you are only listening to speech podcasts and it doesn't interfere with hearing what's going on in the outside world. If I wake up in the night. I listen to a podcast to lull me back to sleep. Music wouldn't work for me, I need a voice droning in my ear!
I usually download stuff from BBC sounds . (So, free of charge) They have enough audio books, comedy programmes, science programmes, and other interesting programmes to fill a day's listening. I have a huge backlog of In Our Time downloaded and there are over 1000 all together on the BBC site, available indefinitely. I'm sorry I can't contribute by paying a licence fee but I live outside the UK.
For light entertainment I listen to No Such Thing As A Fish by the QI elves. There are over 500 of those available as they come out weekly.
Otherwise there are podcasts for free on Amazon Music and Google Podcasts. The Fish ones are now available on BBC sounds but I can't access them there as they are blocked for those outside the UK. No problem finding them - or downloading them- on their own websites or on the two platforms just mentioned though. Advert breaks are hardly noticeable.
The Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Sounds says it's not available outside the UK but that I do get in my BBC Sounds Inbox as soon as the series starts - the whole series in one big lump!
I haven't yet seen a podcast you have to pay for. Oh no, wait a minute, I was an avid listener for over a decade to Kermode and Mayo's film review podcast when they were on 5live. But now they have gone over to a private company and the podcast is not as good, plus they have introduced a subscription fee and only put out a small part of their chat for non-subscribers and to hear the rest you have to pay the (admittedly small) subscription. This gives you other perks as well, but as the tone of the podcast has somehow changed - for the worse IMO - I'm not really interested.