How to Start a Podcast: Gear, Costs and the Real Workload

The equipment is the part people research and the part that matters least. A usable microphone is around fifty dollars, hosting and a domain run a few hundred a year, and neither is what ends podcasts.

The cost that decides whether you are still publishing in a year is two to three hours of editing per hour of episode, every week, indefinitely. Budget that before you buy anything.

The gear, in real numbers

From r/podcasts: "Around $40-50 for a mic and pop filter, x4 for each host. And that's about it really."

The warning attached, from r/podcasting: "Starting a podcast can seem like an expensive venture. You can spend hundreds of dollars on equipment in hopes that it will deliver the"

Spending more does not fix the two things that actually make a podcast sound amateur, which are the room and the distance from mouth to microphone. A fifty dollar mic six inches away in a room with soft furnishings beats an expensive one across a desk in an empty office. Curtains, a rug and a bookshelf will do more for your sound than a hardware upgrade.

Recording on a phone is genuinely fine

A modern phone records perfectly publishable audio if it is close to the speaker and out of a reverberant room. It is the correct way to start, and it is also the correct backup recording for every remote interview you ever do.

• Record locally on each end rather than relying on the call. Call audio is compressed and drops.
• Voice memo apps record uncompressed enough for speech. Use the phone as the primary or the safety.
• Keep the phone off the table. Table vibration is the most common ruined take.
• Record thirty seconds of room tone before you start. It saves the edit later.

The one thing a phone will not solve is the room. If your recording sounds hollow, move somewhere with more soft surfaces before you buy an interface.

The recurring costs

A concrete figure from r/podcasts: "The recurring costs for us were about $381 a year for our domain registration, website hosting, and podcast hosting (we did the Podbean"

Call it thirty dollars a month for the infrastructure of an ongoing show. That is small enough that it is never the reason a podcast stops, which is worth knowing before you spend a fortnight comparing hosting plans.

Software: buy the subscription later, if at all

Recording and editing software is where new podcasters overspend on things they will not use. Start with what is free, and buy a subscription only once you can name the specific thing it fixes for you.

• A free editor handles cutting, levels and export for a speech show. That is most of the job.
• Remote recording platforms are worth paying for when you interview guests regularly, because they record each end locally.
• Transcript-based editors are genuinely faster for interviews, and worth a trial before a year of anything.
• Whatever you use, export a copy of the raw audio before editing. Recover-from-scratch is otherwise impossible.

The cost that actually ends podcasts

Someone in r/podcasting who collected fifty responses summarises it: "Generally podcast editing is a 2:1 editing ratio (2 hours editing per 1 hour of content)"

A professional in another thread sets the quality bar higher: "As a professional podcast editor it generally takes 2-3x the length of the episode to edit if you are aiming for quality."

And the far end, from r/podcasting: "Our episodes are an hour long. Recording takes about 1.5 hours, and then editing takes as much as 8 hours"

Put that in the same units as the gear. A weekly hour-long show at the middle of that range is roughly ten hours a month of editing. At any rate you would pay yourself, it dwarfs the $381 a year, and it is the number to decide on before buying a microphone.

Where those hours go, and which are delegable

From r/podcasting: "I usually spend about 2-3 hours editing an hour-long episode. Cutting dead air and stutters takes the most time,"

That is a mechanical pass, which is good news: it is the part that can be automated or handed off without losing anything of yours. The judgement calls, what to keep and whether a tangent earns its place, are what actually need you.

One rule that saves hours, from r/podcasting: "I edit about half of them. If it's a stand alone, unnecessary UM, it's definitely gone. But mid sentence, I don't mind them sparingly, either". Cutting every filler word costs hours and makes hosts sound robotic.

And a ceiling, from a thread on how much editing is too much: "I think 4 times the length is probably too much fussing." Set that as a hard stop and publish.

A realistic first-year budget

• Microphone and pop filter per host: about $40 to $50 each.
• Hosting, domain and site: roughly $381 a year, per the figure above.
• Editing: two to three hours per hour of episode, priced at whatever your time is worth.
• Artwork and music: one-off, and genuinely optional at the start.

Three of those four are trivial and one is not. Podcasts do not fail because the microphone was too cheap.

The short version

• Fifty dollars buys enough microphone. Fix the room instead.
• A phone is a legitimate start and a mandatory backup.
• Infrastructure runs a few hundred dollars a year.
• Budget two to three hours of editing per hour of episode. Stop at four.
• Dead air and stutters eat most of the edit, and that part is delegable.
• Do not cut every filler word. Half is the working rule.

Read next

• What a Podcast Actually Costs to Start and Run, for the costs broken down further.
• Audio: Mic Distance Beats Mic Price, for the recording habits that decide how it sounds.

A simple multicam episode with an intro fits inside four editing hours, which is what our free first video covers, so you can price the recurring cost against your own episode rather than a guess.