My entire podcast production stack for under $100/mo. what I use and what I dropped.
I run a weekly interview podcast in the tech/startup space. about 2,000 downloads per episode. 18 months of iteration on my tools. here's where I landed.
recording: Riverside ($15/mo). remote interviews in separate audio and video tracks. quality is noticeably better than zoom recordings because each person's audio is recorded locally and synced.
editing: Descript ($24/mo). I edit the podcast like a google doc - see the transcript, highlight what I want to cut, delete it, audio cuts with it. 3-4 hours per episode down to about 45 minutes. the filler word removal is magic. one click removes every um, uh, you know from both speakers. studio sound cleans up audio recorded in my home office with no acoustic treatment.
show notes and descriptions: after each episode I dictate a summary through willow voice while the conversation is still fresh, then feed that into claude to draft the episode description, show notes, and social media posts. the whole process takes about 15 minutes instead of the hour it used to take typing from scratch.
hosting: Buzzsprout ($12/mo). simple, reliable, good analytics. distributes everywhere. paid plan includes a basic website.
social clips: Opus Clip ($19/mo). takes the full episode video and generates short clips. not perfect but 80% there. I pick the best 3-4 and post them. replaced paying a video editor $200/episode.
music: Epidemic Sound ($15/mo). royalty-free, the search is good, quality is way above free alternatives.
total: ~$85/mo.
what I dropped: GarageBand (functional but slow - descript is 5x faster), Anchor/Spotify for Podcasters (limited analytics), Otter.ai (descript does transcription better and built-in).
the tooling in 2026 is incredible compared to 2 years ago. the barrier to making a podcast is nearly zero. the barrier to making a good one is still effort and consistency.
what does your podcast stack look like?