Ep 103: How I Dropped My Podcasting Costs By 65% - How to Run Your Podcast for Less

Verity: 00:00:00

Hello there and welcome back to another episode of Lazy Girls Guide to Podcasting with me, Verity. Today, in this episode, we are going to be looking at how I slashed my podcasting costs by 65%, which I think is just ridiculous.

I did an episode, I want to say, about episode 80. I'll have it linked down in the show notes below. But about episode 80, I did a.

An episode all about the running costs for Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting. And I'm not going to lie, I was quite shocked at how much my monthly costs of the podcast ended up being.

I think podcasting is just one of those things that you can end up being like, oh, I need this subscription, I need that subscription. This looks really good, that looks really good. And before you know it, things just kind of like, pile up and you're paying.

Well, in my case I'm just having a little look at the numbers, but in my case, I. I was spending $1,303.99 a year, which in Britain is about equivalent to a thousand pounds. It's about 85 quid per month.

85 pounds per month, that would be like, what, just over $100? I think USD. But either way, that's a lot of money. So I kind of looked at it and I'll give you a very quick breakdown.

If you haven't listened to episode 80, exactly what I was bending on. I'm just going to go through this very quickly because if you want to listen to it in more depth, then you can go back to the previous.

The previous episode. So I was paying 10 to 15 per month for summarize, which is an AI tool so that I could be helped with writing my show notes and that kind of thing.

I was paying around 19 per month. Sorry, I'm flipping between pounds and dollars because some of the stuff is in dollars, some of it's in pounds, some of it I haven't converted, etc.

But I was paying roughly 19 per month for Riverside. I was on the standard monthly plan. I was using video AI, which was free, so that was fine.

I was paying around £131.88 for my WordPress hosting, which is around $166 per month. No, sorry, not per month per year for WordPress hosting, that's through Hostinger. And then around 16 for my domain name per year.

WordPress itself is free. I was using Elementor Pro for my website, which is 59 per year. I was using the plugin WP Rocket, which is a caching plugin.

It helps speed up the website. That's 59 per year. And I was using ConvertKit on the creator plan for $108 per year. It's just a lot. It was adding, it was adding up.

It was giving me an annual spend, as I said, of around $1,300. It's a lot of money. But I then sat down and I was like, well, hang on a minute, this is a lot of money.

And one of the things that I was finding was that, I mean, to me, I didn't think it was a lot of money in terms of. I love podcasting. It's my hobby. A lot of people spend a hell of a lot more than like £80 500ish dollars per month on their hobby.

You could say that's actually quite cheap for a hobby. But, but I wanted to see how, how more budget conscious I could be with my podcasting and actually, would it make any, any difference?

So with that in mind, these are my new, my new figures and this is how I managed to. This is what I got rid of as well. And why, why I got rid of.

First thing that I'm spending is probably the biggest amount of output when it comes to my podcast is I'm still paying £131.88, which is around $166 per year for my WordPress hosting. And that's through hosting, as I said, I am fully aware that I can get a free website probably elsewhere or I could get a cheaper website somewhere.

I am fully aware that with my host, which I'll come on to in a minute, my podcast host, I get a free website as part of that subscription package. But you know what? I love having my own WordPress site. I can do so many different things with it and I just absolutely love it.

Hostinger themselves are an amazing, amazing service. My, I have several domains and they're all through there. I have several websites.

Everything is through Hostinger and they are just, they are, they're brilliant. I find that their customer support, whenever I have had to reach out to them is just so quick. They are amazing. I love hostinger.

As you can tell, they give you email addresses as part of your package as well. And there's just so many features. I just, I just think they're hosting an absolutely wonderful, really fast Internet speeds as well for your website.

Just love them. So like I said, I'm still spending 131 pounds or equivalent to about 166 USD every year on my WordPress hosting.

WordPress itself is free, but I have to pay for the hosting through hostinger. The next thing that I am still paying for is 59 per year for WP Rocket.

I know and fully appreciate that there are lots and lots and lots and lots of free caching plugins out there that I don't need to spend $60 per year, which is. I don't. I can't really convert that to pounds in my head. I don't know, 50, 60 pounds, something like that.

I don't need to be spending that on a caching plugin, but I want to. I love WP Rocket. I find it so easy to use. It's a plugin that works for WordPress.

If you use WordPress then you'll know that you can customize your website using these different plugins. WP Rocket I just find is really, really useful to use.

It has so many additional features to a free caching plugin and I just find that it's pretty brilliant at speeding up my website and things like image optimization. It just, it does so much all in one plugin and it kind of got rid.

When I got WP Rockets, it kind of got rid of about three or four other plugins that were. I was using these different plugins to all try and do the same thing when actually I could just get rid of those and just use one plugin.

So less code for my website as well. So again makes it faster. The next thing that I spend money on for the podcast is Captivate fm. Now Captivate is my podcast hosting platform.

Shout Outs Captivate. Love you guys. Mark Asquith, who runs Captivate had the pleasure of meeting him several times been on his podcast. He has been on this podcast.

Can't remember exactly which episode it was, but we interviewed in person in May at the Podcast London Podcast show which was amazing. And I'll have that link down in the comments below as well in the show notes. I mean, have a listen to that episode. It's really, really good.

But Captivate I absolutely love. I spend 17 pounds per month, which I think is around 19 ish dollars, something like that per month. I'm on the monthly plan.

What I love about Captivate is that you pay for the amount of downloads that you get.

long as you're getting under: 30000

I was with Megaphone now through Megaphone, because I was part of a podcasting network. They paid the subscription fee, so I actually got to use Megaphone for free. Didn't really end up working out.

Didn't like Megaphone, so I moved away from that, which is why there's now an additional cost. Because previously, as I said, I wasn't paying for. I wasn't paying for my podcast hosting, but I am now with. With Captivate.

Wanted to be more independent again. So that's around 17 pounds per month. Love Captivates. It's. I'm not moving away from them. They're brilliant.

So my total annual spend, all of that combined, is now $453. 35. And just to remind you from before, I was spending $1,303.99 per year. Getting it down to $453, I think is brilliant.

So that is a 65% decrease in my running costs of the. Of the podcast. And I don't think the quality of the podcast has been affected at all.

You know, then you can kind of start asking yourself, well, why are we spending all this money on podcasting? Podcasting doesn't have to be an expensive hobby at all.

And you might actually be asking yourself, well, what have I replaced some of these things with? I realized a lot of the things that I was using in Elementor Pro was just vanity, really, and, like, making the website look pretty.

I wasn't doing anything to actually bring traffic to the website or the podcast. I was like, well, this is ridiculous. Let's just get rid of it. So that saved me $59 per year. ConvertKit, I.

I pledged at the beginning of: 2024

We all know that, you know, that just kind of didn't happen by about halfway through the year for a variety of reasons. But I then was like, well, why am I spending $108 per year on having all of these different features in ConvertKit that I'm just not using?

So I switched over to their free plan. I downgraded. You know, if you're still on the email newsletter, you'll still continue to get newsletters when I write them. But like I said, I just.

I couldn't see the point in spending $100 per year when I just wasn't using all of those features so I downgraded. So I'm still using ConvertKit, but I'm using their free plan now. The other thing that I have stopped using is Summarize.

I've done a review video and a review episode on Summarize before. I think it is brilliant. But I just started running into some issues with Summarize.

I don't know if it was just me or whether or not there were more people, but basically I just found that whenever I was putting content through the platform it just started kind of like getting stuck and then what should have been done in a couple of minutes was suddenly taking forever and it was just, I don't know. And then I found like support started to be a bit hit and miss.

As to getting to me, I still think it's a brilliant platform, but I was also like, hang on, I'm paying all this money and service maybe isn't as amazing as it was in the beginning. And I don't know whether or not that's a technical issue. I don't know if it was just my experience. I don't know.

Either way, I'm not spending all that money with Summarize anymore. I am thinking of switching over to though. Is that Captivate?

As I said, my podcast hosting platform, they have now got something called Captivate Spark, which I'm gonna do a review video for in in a couple of episodes time when I've set it up and I've started having a little play with it. But I'm thinking of having a go with Captivate Spark. So it's five pounds per month. You get five hours worth of transcription.

If you don't use that transcription, it rolls over to the next month and you can either pay monthly or you can do pay as you go and either do 5, 10 or 20 hours I think, which is 5 pounds, 10 pounds and 20 pounds respectively. So it's up to you whether or not you want to do, as I said, pay as you go or if you want to do it monthly.

But I haven't had a test out of it yet, but I'm thinking, do you know £5? Let's just have a go. We'll do it for a month, see what it's like.

It's got a lot of features and what I really like about the idea of Captivate Spark, as I said, I haven't used it yet, is that as well as generating different show note episode title suggestions, it looks at the catalog of your podcast episodes and it suggests other content for your podcast that you might think is relevant or that your audience might enjoy. So I'm interested to test out that feature as well. As I said, I will be doing a review video in the future of that.

But just to recap and kind of round off this episode, the thing that I was really trying to do with this experiment exercise, call it what you will, is see how much I could cut the costs of my podcasting. Can I cut them further? Yeah, definitely. I can definitely cut down the costs of $453 per year.

I do think it's really impressive almost that I got those podcasting costs right down. And I think it just goes to demonstrate that you don't have to spe the world on podcasting. You know, it doesn't have to be an expensive hobby.

So I hope you have found this episode useful as ever. I would be really interested to know what your podcasting running costs are. Are you thinking that your podcast running costs are too high?

Are you looking at getting them down? I'd be really interested to know. Reach out to me eritysongone on Instagram. So if you're on YouTube, make sure you drop a comment below as well.

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