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…