Price your transcripts, show notes, chapter markers, and clip captions before they quietly eat your CPM. Plug in episode runtime, release cadence, and how many derivative assets you actually ship per drop — get a per-episode and per-month bill across Whisper, Deepgram, GPT-5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and 25+ more providers.
A modern podcast episode is not one file. It's a transcript, a set of show notes, a description, a title, a chapter list, three to five social clips with burned-in captions, a YouTube description, and a newsletter blurb. Each of those goes through at least one AI call — sometimes the same transcript fed five different ways. By the time the episode is live everywhere, you've quietly run a multi-step AI workflow whose total cost is nowhere near the "per-minute transcription price" you saw on a vendor's landing page.
Most podcast-tool pricing pages quote one number: cost-per-minute of audio. That number is useful for the transcription line and useless for everything downstream. The question podcasters actually have to answer is: "If I publish weekly at 70-minute average runtime and ship five clips, two newsletters, and a YouTube cut from each episode, does the full AI stack still fit under a single midroll sponsor read?"
This calculator is built to short-circuit that surprise. Enter the shape of your workflow — runtime, drops per month, transcript length, number of show-note passes, and how many derivative assets you generate — and it cross-multiplies against the published rates for every major speech-to-text and LLM provider. Output: a sortable monthly bill you can drop straight into a Notion budget or a sponsor proposal.
Before you commit to a publishing cadence, model whether the AI cost survives the per-download payout. A weekly 60-minute show with 5,000 average downloads at a $25 host-read CPM brings in roughly $125 per episode. If transcript + show notes + five clips + a YouTube cut already cost $4.50, the line item is small but real — and it compounds if you scale to twice-weekly. The calculator answers that ratio in seconds.
Podcasters routinely conflate transcription cost with show-note cost. They're priced on completely different units — per-minute of audio versus per-token of text — and they move independently when you change vendors. The calculator pulls them apart so you can see, say, "transcription is fine on Whisper at $0.36/episode, but my show-notes pass is $0.42 because I'm running it through GPT-5 four times."
If you publish five short-form clips per episode, you're either re-sending the full transcript five times (expensive) or sending a single batched prompt that returns all five clips at once (cheap). The calculator lets you toggle batching to see exactly how much it saves. For most weekly shows, batching is a $20-$40/month line-item difference.
Most established podcasts have 50-300 untranscribed episodes sitting in the archive. The calculator lets you estimate a one-time backfill cost — useful for deciding whether to invest the spend now, before your transcripts become a search-traffic moat for your show page.
If you sell a "sponsor-included clip package" or a branded transcript landing page, model the AI cost into your rate card before quoting. A custom-edited 60-second sponsor clip with captions might cost you $0.40 of AI to produce — trivial against a $400 read, but worth knowing if you're packaging it as a $50 add-on.
Three failure modes show up over and over in production podcast AI workflows:
The calculator surfaces all three by design — it asks for runtime, asset count, batching mode, and provider separately, then recomputes the bill against every supported speech-to-text and LLM service. See OpenAI's pricing page for the canonical Whisper and GPT-5 rates, Anthropic's Claude pricing for the latest Sonnet and Opus tier numbers, or Deepgram's pricing page for the streaming and pre-recorded splits that matter when you're transcribing a backlog versus a live show.
To make the numbers concrete, here's how a typical "weekly interview show" lands when run through the calculator:
| Stack | Cost / episode | Monthly bill |
|---|---|---|
| Whisper + GPT-5 (un-batched) | $2.10 | $8.40 |
| Whisper + Claude Sonnet 4.6 (batched) | $0.84 | $3.36 |
| Deepgram + Gemini 3 Flash (batched) | $0.38 | $1.52 |
| Deepgram + DeepSeek V3.1 (batched) | $0.31 | $1.24 |
| Mixed (Whisper + Flash drafts + Sonnet polish) | $0.62 | $2.48 |
Numbers above are illustrative. Plug your real workflow into the live tool to get a current comparison with the latest published rates. The "mixed" row is the pattern most podcast teams settle into — a cheap workhorse for drafting all the artifacts, a smarter model for the title and description that actually appear on the episode card.
An AI bill is one line on the show's P&L. The other lines that matter — and where the TinyTools suite already covers the rest:
The pattern is the same across all of them: free, single-purpose, no signup. If you want a broader view of how independent podcasters think about workflow economics in 2026, Podnews and Riverside's blog both publish solid coverage of the production-and-distribution side of the equation.
Yes — the comparison table is plain HTML, so you can copy it into a Notion proposal, a sponsor SOW, or a Linear issue. Many podcasters use the per-episode number as a floor when pricing branded-content add-ons.
Yes. GPT-5 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini Flash, DeepSeek's full lineup, plus Groq-hosted Whisper-large-v3 and Replicate's Whisper variants are all in the comparison. Mini tiers are usually 5-20x cheaper than the flagship and good enough for titles, chapter timestamps, and clip-caption work.
The calculator reads from a price table that we update whenever a major provider publishes a change. Expect 1-3 day lag on smaller providers, near-real-time on the top five.
Self-hosted GPU pricing is too workload-dependent to model accurately, but we cover the major hosted serverless rates (Together, Fireworks, Groq, Replicate) for Whisper and the open-source LLMs — those are a reasonable upper bound for what self-hosting saves.
Yes. Toggle the diarization flag and the calculator switches to the diarized-tier price for each transcription provider that exposes one. The cost premium is usually 15-30% over the plain-transcript rate.