Calculator
Podcast Guest Prep Cost Calculator
Price the booking and preparation hours behind every guest episode, including what reschedules quietly add to the bill.
Free tools
Calculators for Independent Interview Shows
Two quick tools that put numbers on the parts of a weekly show nobody tracks: the hours behind each booking and the outreach it takes to stay booked.
Hosts track download numbers closely and track their own labor almost never. Booking a guest, chasing a bio, writing questions, and rebuilding a slot after a cancellation are real hours that sit outside the recording and the edit, and they are the hours that decide whether a weekly cadence is sustainable through a busy quarter.
These calculators run entirely in your browser and ask for nothing. The first prices the booking and prep hours behind each episode so you can see what the admin actually costs you in a year. The second works backward from your publishing schedule to the number of invitations you need to send and the outreach hours that implies. Both use realistic defaults for a solo interview show, so change the numbers to match your own week.
Calculator
Podcast Guest Pipeline Calculator
Work backward from your publishing schedule to the number of invitations, the confirmed guests in hand, and the outreach hours it takes to never miss a week.
Working document
The One Page Guest Prep Sheet Template
A fill in sheet you can print or keep open on a second screen, holding everything you need about a guest in the order you will actually use it during the interview.
Why these calculators are open to every host
Every independent host already does this arithmetic somewhere, usually in a notes app between edits or in their head at midnight. How many invitations a weekly guest slot swallows in a month. What an hour of chasing a bio and a headshot that is not a cropped conference badge is really worth. How many confirmed guests have to be sitting in the calendar so one Tuesday cancellation does not turn Thursday into a rerun. Those numbers exist whether anyone writes them down or not, and most hosts meet them the week the booking pipeline runs dry.
So both tools run in your browser with no account, no address, and nothing to sign. Put in your own reply rate, your own lead time between the yes and the record, and your own prep hours, and the answers are yours to keep even if you never open MicPrep again. A host who learns that guest admin costs a hundred and fifty hours a year has learned something real about the shape of their show, and that alone is worth the page. If it also explains why a structured questionnaire and an assembled prep sheet exist, that is a fair trade.
Both totals point at the same guest admin
Run either calculator and the hours pile up in the same stretch: outreach, confirmations, chasing assets, and rebuilding prep after a reschedule. A demo shows which part of that total is genuinely editorial work and which part is clerical work a questionnaire can absorb. We will use your own publishing cadence rather than our defaults.