I Turned 230 Podcast Episodes Into a $33 RAG Pipeline Instead of Paying $600/Month for Coaching

There’s a personal finance podcast I like — a married couple talking through debt, budgeting, and money management for ADHD brains like mine. They also sell coaching. $600 a month. Here’s the thing: they’ve been podcasting for years. If they have a real framework, they’ve probably already said the whole thing out loud, for free, across a couple hundred episodes. I just needed a way to actually get at it. So instead of paying for coaching, I built a pipeline. The Bet Download every episode. Transcribe it. Make it searchable. Ask it questions the way I’d ask a coach. If the framework is real, it should hold up under direct interrogation — not just vibes-based skimming of show notes. Total cost to test that bet against 230 episodes and ~145 hours of audio: about $33. Problem One: Your Files Are Too Big The mp3s ran up to 150MB each — full episodes at a decent bitrate. Every transcription API has a file-size ceiling well below that, and there’s no server-side workaround. You shrink the…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town