[siruva07]

PodSnacks (https://podsnacks.org) — Personalized AI summaries of top podcasts, delivered to your inbox.

I've been building PodSnacks because I found it overwhelming to keep up with podcasts across tech, business, and science. PodSnacks uses LLMs to summarize the most popular episodes from shows like Lex Fridman, Acquired, All-In, Invest Like the Best, and more.

You choose your favorite shows, and we email you short, high-signal summaries — no audio to skim through, no endless backlog guilt.

So far:

126K+ episode summaries generated 92K+ hours of podcasts processed 48–50% open rates 2,900+ early users

Still iterating and adding features like bundling by theme, language translations, and audio feeds.

If you're the kind of person who wants more inputs without more noise — would love for you to check it out.

Always open to feedback from HN!

[akudha]

What are the costs like, for such a service? You have to spend for transcribing (even if you ran something like Whisper) and pay for APIs to summarize, correct?

[siruva07]

yep. won't go into each cost, but it's primarily:

1) transcription (Assembly) 2) summarization (Claude) 3) podcast database (listennotes) 4) emails (postmark) 5) application hosting (render)

[hsuduebc2]

I'm also interested in this. :)

[jbverschoor]

I’d prefer summaries of my YouTube subscriptions, where I can also add my own “summary template”

In currently have a prompt for it that works for me, based on the transcripts.

Problem: too much duplicate information in any type of publication and too much fluff

Problem2: YouTube/transcriptions

Probably wouldn’t pay for such a service, but would be very happy using it. Perhaps some channel promo / email based ads for discovery or recommendations.

[siruva07]

perhaps gemini will native work with YouTube much better than we could.

[qwertox]

Interesting. Once signed in, how do I search for podcasts? Discover is not showing a search field, unlike https://www.podsnacks.org/newsletter/podcasts

Edit: Ok, I found the search function in the hamburger menu. A bit unintuitive.

[siruva07]

will add search to discover. thanks for the comment.

[bcye]

That's awesome! I'm really not a podcast person, but a lot of good content is available primarily through podcasts. Hope that can help with it.

[siruva07]

thanks and agreed! we see a massive distrust in traditional legacy media, and hopefully PodSnacks can give readers more control about how they access those voices.

[atlgator]

Just signed up! Do you use different AI prompts for each podcast based on the specialty or a single prompt?

[siruva07]

currently a single prompt.

[quichenp]

any way to expose api access for the keyword search feature? would be cool to build this into some topic summaries delivered via email I'm building for my team

[siruva07]

at the moment no, but perhaps you'll enjoy podscan.fm