What podcast cleanup really costs per episode: the worksheet
This is the wall the whole bench answers to: every cleanup lane, priced per episode from list prices and printed assumptions — because “affordable” is an adjective and $2.75 is a fact.
The whole wall
| Route | Monthly | Per episode | How it covers you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Enhance, free tier | $0.00/mo | $0.00 | 1 free hour/day covers a weekly show; files split to fit 30-min cap |
| Audacity, manual pass | $0.00/mo | $0.00 | profile-based noise reduction; costs your evening instead |
| Krisp Core (annual) | $8.00/mo | $2.00 | live-cleans remote interviews while you record |
| Adobe Enhance Premium | $9.99/mo | $2.50 | 4 h/day, hour-long files, strength slider |
| Cleanvoice 10 h/month | $11.00/mo | $2.75 | 6 raw hours/month fits the 10 h plan; credits roll over |
| Descript Hobbyist (annual) | $16.00/mo | $4.00 | Studio Sound rides along with the full editor |
| Assumptions, printed where you can argue with them: 4 episodes a month, 60-minute shows, about 1.5 hours of raw audio each. Annual-billing rates used where they exist (they halve Krisp; monthly doubles it). List prices verified July 30, 2026. | |||
How to argue with this worksheet (please do)
Change the assumptions and the ranking reshuffles — that’s the point of printing them. Cadence: subscriptions divide by episodes, so a daily show makes Descript’s $4.00 look different than a monthly one does. Raw hours: interview shows with long tapes tilt toward Cleanvoice’s per-hour model and its rollover. Failure cost: a sponsored episode that ships muddy costs more than a year of any lane here — which is the honest argument for the paid prevention lane on high-stakes shows.
The doors where money enters
The bench’s standing advice: stay at $0.00 — record it right, clean it free — until a specific wall defeats you twice in a month. Then pay for that wall and nothing else: noisy weekly guests → the live lane; evenings lost to ums → the housekeeping lane; a workflow you want collapsed into one tool → the suite lane. Walls you haven’t hit are subscriptions you don’t owe.
Asked at the bench
- What does podcast noise cleanup cost per episode overall?
- At a weekly cadence: $0.00 on the free lanes (Adobe Enhance free, Audacity), $2.00 for live-cleaned interviews (Krisp Core annual), $2.75 for full housekeeping (Cleanvoice 10 h), $2.50 for Enhance Premium, $4.00 for the Descript suite. All computed from list prices, verified July 30, 2026.
- Are these numbers realistic for MY show?
- They’re arithmetic on printed assumptions: four episodes a month, 60-minute shows, ~90 raw minutes each. Publish fortnightly and the per-episode subscription costs double; daily show, they collapse. The assumptions are on every table so you can re-run the division.
- What’s the cheapest path to a clean weekly show?
- Prevention plus the free lane: the twenty-minute recording setup ($0), then one Enhance free pass per track ($0). Money enters honestly at exactly two doors — weekly noisy interviews (Krisp) or chronic um-and-silence editing (Cleanvoice).