Podcast season launch budget: 12 episodes, art, music, teasers

Launching a 12-episode podcast season with three cover-art options, three theme tracks, a transcript of each 45-minute episode and one captioned teaser per episode costs $9.08 on Sume. Transcripts are the largest line at $5.40, and they are the one you pay for again if you add episodes.

This covers production extras, not recording or hosting. All amounts are list-rate estimates from the Sume catalog. They leave out the small Modal compute charge that each inspect job adds to the transcript rate, and the cost of cutting long episodes into chunks first.

Line by line

Cover art at high quality is $0.2225 per image in the catalog, which is the estimate for a high-quality request with no size set; an explicit size is billed from image tokens and can come in lower. Three options at the catalog figure are $0.6675. Theme tracks from Lyria 3.5 are $0.125 each. The transcript rate is $0.01 per audio minute and a single job takes a duration hint up to 600 seconds, so a 45-minute episode is five jobs of at most ten minutes, still $0.45 in total. Teaser trims are $0.02 and captions are $0.20 per video up to 60 seconds.

What the transcripts give you

A transcript per episode is the raw material for show notes, chapter lists and teaser selection. Pay for the transcript before you choose teaser moments, so the $0.22 spent on a trim and a caption goes to a moment you picked from text instead of a guess. If you publish video episodes, the same transcripts feed captions; if you publish audio only, skip the teaser trims and captions and the season drops to $6.44.

Budget the second season now

Cover art and theme tracks are one-time costs. Episodes are not. After launch the recurring cost is $0.45 per episode for the transcript and $0.22 per teaser, so about $0.67 an episode. Twelve more episodes cost $8.04.

Choose a top-up that covers the whole season in one purchase; the wallet is topped up manually in the dashboard.

• One-time: cover art and music, $1.04.
• Per episode: transcript, trim and caption, $0.67.
• Keep a few dollars in reserve for rerunning one episode's transcript.

Choosing among the cover options

Three high-quality cover candidates cost $0.6675. A cheaper route is low-quality drafts and then one high-quality final: low quality uses far fewer output tokens than high per image, so drafts cost a fraction of a final. Podcast apps show covers small, so test legibility at thumbnail size before you pay for the final.

Cover art needs a prompt that avoids small text. Put the show title in your own design tool if letter accuracy matters; image models can misspell.

• Draft low, finalize high.
• Check the cover at a small size.
• Keep the winning prompt with the show's other assets.

Where the budget can move

Longer episodes scale only the transcript line: a 90-minute episode is $0.90 instead of $0.45. More teasers scale trims and captions: three teasers per episode is $0.66 per episode instead of $0.22. Neither changes the one-time cost of art and music. Decide the teaser count before launch, since it is the line most likely to grow.

A note on the transcript rate

The $0.01 per minute figure is the public rate for video inspect transcripts as read in the docs on 2026-10-03, and the docs say to confirm it against the pricing page. A single request takes a duration hint up to 600 seconds, and omitting the hint reserves one minute, so always send the real length of each chunk. Splitting the episode into chunks is your own step before the request.