What is the Voxiferi Annual Plan ?

The background and rationale

We have worked very hard to itemize and price our recordings and broadcasts to be at a price break which is extremely cost effective. We work on the basis that we are recording content with a customer who we travel to record with, we research and work with the customer. Working with them to get the best recorded audio possible. We then take that audio back to the studio and edit and tweak it so that it is a segment of a larger show. A show featuring other customers in other verticals or in that same industry sector. We then broadcast that audio to the world on that podcast channel and make it available via syndication and marketing locally and globally.

Out of the cost of the recording. If we take a ten minute length mixed down broadcast created from 30-45 minutes audio recording on site at your location. The very cost effective price of £249.00 for an on-demand professionally mixed ten minute radio show about your business by the time it goes out has cost upwards of four or five hours of studio time before the likes of Spotify or Amazon Music get their hands on the show. The cost of a ten minute radio show, then made available to anyone globally and locally, which has a thousand times more informative punch than a £300 print ad ever could.

However to keep that cost at a low price to afford small businesses an entry point we also have to rationally appraise the cost of doing business, of order processing and merchant services, travelling to site and recording and then taking those complex audio segments and taking them back to the studio. In the studio then spending two or three hours editing and cutting and making that audio, recorded in person at your location, into a exceptionally polished vehicle for broadcast.

Just like any other sale of goods or service we are VAT liable and 20% therefore goes immediately to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We then have the time and travel costs, the studio costs and the amortised cost of technology, web hosting, cloud storage, and then bandwidth. But then talking to our customers most, if not all, are VAT registered so are able to reclaim the VAT from HMRC and this is purely an unavoidable cost of doing business in the United Kingdom. Print advertising also carries VAT so we are no different.

To keep the costs extremely low, the lowest in the UK, we break out the technical items that we know, from our twelve years of hosted data, afford us to be able to keep a recorded segment on the air, or a full show broadcasting 24/7 long before the 365 day mark, if a customer chooses not to re-record (which is the popular option) a year on.

We have three essential building blocks of a show or segment

1. The show consists of audio recorded at a bit rate that is then modified and polished in the studio prior to broadcast
2. That show output is a large set of data files that are hosted and mirrored in two locations in the UK and US for redundancy.
3. The show itself is then pushed and syndicated to Amazon Music, Spotify, Deezer, Apple Podcasts etc which has a cost of bandwidth.

So by stripping out and amortising those costs on a per show basis we actually ensure that we can keep our costs extremely low, and we do wonder why other podcasters cannot take this approach. It would seem to afford customers a much better and much more competitively priced on-ramp.

We then built out a model and worked out that if we charged, for example £40 or £65 a year for a recorded podcast to be hosted, once the VAT came off that and the cost of sale from the card vendor of 1.10% then we could allocate £21.40 a year per show for bandwidth (15 min show) and £36 a year (35 min show). Add £6.10 and £9.54 respectively a year for the cost of disk storage and redundant failover in the US (cheap backup storage direct to SSD). That then afforded us roughly £4 for marketing and advertising per show recorded. Less than the price of a Big Mac, but when you add them all up, a tray of Big Mac's equates to us being able to do promotion and syndication much smarter. And that keeps prices down !

So yes, we have a fee for a recording of the audio for the podcast, it's editing and polishing and eventual broadcast.

AND ALSO

We have an annual recurring fee, payable on the anniversary of the broadcast for the "bandwidth and hosting" of the show segment or show itself. And it's peanuts. It's absolute peanuts.

If we needed further justification

If we do a cost comparison against a print media circulation, local advertising supported circular or short-print-run glossy handout. We charge for a ten minute professionally produced show. A show featuring you, your staff, even your customers, produced and broadcast to a local and global audience that is there 24/7 on-demand 365 days a year (until you decide to update it - more on that later) a small fee and an annual hosting charge (Option 1 or 2 depending on segment length or you taking a whole 35 minute show).

The cost, we have researched, exhaustively, of placing a single framed boxed advert in print media for one run that will garner attention (you hope) of a local new or repeat audience is £150-220 and an A4 page often £230-400. For a print ad. A print ad on paper. That will have a much tinier reach, and will be pulped and recycled (or collected and pulped by the publisher) within a few days or weeks of publication. So then you need to run another a few weeks or months later, and another, and another to give yourself 12 months of coverage - akin to the podcast.

So if we use a basic example

1 x Print Ad half page - local circular with circulation of 12,000 readers (homes that get it put through door - many of whom put it straight in the recycle bin because it's 2025 and many people do not sadly appreciate print media - even free print media). The cost of that ad £180.00 plus VAT

You run it in January, you run another ad in February, one at Easter, one in the Summer and then another in the run up to Christmas.

You've just spent £900 + VAT on a print ad - a box - of printed text, maybe a dithered photo and some graphics. An ad which may not get read, understood or cause impact sufficient to get more than a very small percentage of readers over a very tiny sporadic period of that 365 day period to interact. You're placing a £900 + VAT bet on a three legged horse to win The Grand National. Now everybody loves a punt, but does it make sense in 2025 ?

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The low cost to appear on a podcast that is there 24/7 that is you talking with passion and love about your company, your services your people, your products, featuring customers talking about you, you telling the world about your ambition, your origins and your visions and what you want to achieve. And it's there when you're asleep, it's there when you're shut on bank holidays affording you the ability to always point your own Instagram / Facebook / X / Bluesky or your marketing at it as a really brilliant radio show produced in your offices, your kitchen, your restaurant, your florists, your artisan bakery. A professional show that adds depth and colour to your Facebook page. And remember folks Facebook pages don't create new revenue they just tickle a small percentage of your loyal customer base, that is why Facebook want customers to engage and spend on boosts in the hope that something sticks.

We prefer to work smarter. Because we build immersive radio podcast audio experiences that push and get the best out of you, and also reach audiences print media can't. We are digital, syndicated and pushed by Spotify, Amazon, Deezer, Apple and many others. A digital vehicle piped into listeners ears without our output being pulped and recycled. For the cost of a single print ad you just got 24/7 365 marketing.

Now, here's the magic

We've explained why it's an annual fee (because disk space and bandwidth cost). However, if or around the 12 month anniversary of your show broadcast you want to re-record and put a new show up, maybe a longer one with more focus on stuff you wished you'd talked about we do one thing. We halve the cost of your annual renewal (woah let's not get excited about saving £15/20 and we get you back on air, and we put your new show out.

And here's the rationale - and we can assure you that it makes a lot of sense.

Because the second time round the cost of recording YOU is cheaper. You've done it before (and we're really good at training you). By the time you record a second time you've also heard lots of other companies telling their stories and you want to knock round two out the park and involve other staff members. It is EASIER and CHEAPER and MORE COST EFFECTIVE to us as a company to record you year two. We know this because we've done it with major global brands around the world.

Plus we aren't naive, we like growth and we want happy engaged customers. We want the repeat revenue as much as you want new customers and we absolutely insist on value for money. So. In a nutshell. That's why we have a peanut charge for hosting and bandwidth and we do so, not to rip people off, but actually to scale out a business by itemising the costs of "transport" away from the creation side to the "broadcast side" and it really does make the biggest common sense by doing so. And it also means we renew and we keep relationships with paying customers alive as we are part of their journeys.

Dick Morrell / Dan File / Tina Firrell

Founders - Voxiferi Studios - January 2025