How Much Does It Cost To Produce A Podcast?

Most answers to this question are useless, because they answer a different question. "Anywhere from $0 to $10,000" is technically true and tells you nothing.

Here is a straight answer, then the reasoning behind it.

The short answer

A professionally produced B2B podcast in Australia costs roughly $2,000 to $5,000 a month if someone else runs it end to end. That covers two to four episodes, edited, published and promoted.

You can do it for nothing but your own time. You can spend far more if you record in a studio every week. The middle is where most founder-led shows land, and it is where we sit: from $1,750 +GST a month for two produced episodes, and $2,750 for a fortnightly show published across the Day One® Network.

What actually drives the cost

Five things move the number. Everything else is detail.

1. Cadence

This is the biggest lever. A weekly show is roughly double a fortnightly one, because production cost scales with episodes, not with months. Before you commit to weekly, be honest about whether you can sit down that often. A consistent fortnightly show beats a weekly one that stops in March.

2. Video, or audio only

Audio-only is cheaper and easier. But video is where the distribution is now — YouTube, LinkedIn, vertical clips — and a video edit costs more because there is simply more to cut. If you want short-form clips, you need video, and the cost reflects that.

3. Where you record

Remote recording is the standard and it is the cheap option. A studio day costs more in room hire, crew and travel, and it buys you multi-camera footage, proper lighting and no bad-webcam episodes. Both are legitimate. They are not the same price.

4. What happens after you publish

Editing an episode is the smaller half of the job. Show notes, thumbnails, metadata, clips, scheduling, and getting it in front of people who are not already subscribed — that work is where a show either compounds or quietly dies. Quotes that only cover the edit are quoting half the job.

5. Whether the show exists yet

Producing an agreed show is a different job from designing one. Premise, format, host, guest engine, distribution — that is strategy work, it happens once, and it is priced separately. It is also the part that most determines whether the show works.

What we charge

We publish our prices, because you should be able to work out whether we are in your range without booking a call.

• Production only: $1,750 +GST a month for two episodes. Audio and video editing, short-form clips drawn from each episode and a quarterly strategy call, delivered as publishing-ready files for your team to publish. See production only.
• Production plus Day One Network: $2,750 +GST a month for two episodes. Audio and video editing, short-form clips, show notes, description, metadata and thumbnail, published to your feed and the Day One® Network channels, with ongoing strategy and Slack access. Month to month, no lock-in. See production plus network.
• Weekly with the Day One Network: $5,500 +GST a month. A weekly episode produced, published and distributed, with strategy and reporting included.
• Setup: a one-off $2,000. Applies when you bring a show that is already defined. Waived if you develop the show with us first.
• Show development: around $18,600 +GST. The 14-step framework that designs the show before anyone records. A separate engagement, and it can be split across twelve months.

There is also an executive producer add-on, at $2,500 +GST per episode, which puts a named senior producer into the planning, recording and editorial work for the episodes you choose.

What sits outside a retainer

Worth knowing before you compare quotes, because these are the line items that turn a cheap proposal into an expensive one:

• Studio and on-location recording, booked and billed separately
• Episodes running longer than 40 minutes
• Extra revision rounds beyond the first
• More episodes than your tier covers

The cost nobody quotes you

Your time. A founder-hosted episode takes an hour to record, and then somewhere between three and eight hours of everything else — chasing the guest, prepping questions, reviewing the cut, writing the post, publishing it.

That is the cost that kills most founder podcasts. Not the invoice. The fourteenth Sunday night in a row spent editing audio instead of building the company.

When you compare doing it yourself against paying someone, price your own hours honestly. If a show takes six hours a fortnight of founder time, ask what else those hours could have produced.

Common questions

Can I start a podcast for free?

Yes. A usable microphone, free editing software and a free host will get you published. The constraint is not money, it is whether you can sustain the workload past episode six. Most shows stop there.

Is it cheaper to hire a freelance editor?

Per episode, usually. A freelancer edits what you send them. You still own the planning, the guests, the publishing, the promotion and the consistency. That works well if you want a production pair of hands and have the time to run everything around it.

How long before a podcast pays for itself?

Depends entirely on why you started it. If it is a pipeline play, the honest measure is conversations with the right people, not download counts. A B2B show reaching a few hundred of exactly the right listeners can be worth more than one reaching thousands of the wrong ones.

Why do agency quotes vary so much?

Usually scope. Some quote the edit only. Some include distribution. Some include the strategy work, some price it separately. When you compare, line up cadence, video or audio, and what happens after publish — then the numbers become comparable.

Working out what you need

If you already know the show you want to make, you need a producer and a price. If you are not sure what the show is yet, start there instead — it is the cheaper mistake to fix.

Either way, a call is the fastest way to find out which one you are. Twenty-five minutes, no deck.

Book a call with Adam, or see what our podcast production services include.