Do I lose my Castos transcripts when I migrate?

Castos exports transcripts as PDF only, and PDFs don’t preserve timestamps in a way that transfers to another platform.

What you can do: re-transcribe. The Transcription add-on runs your back catalog through your own transcription provider at roughly $0.18 per 30-minute episode — about $18 for 100 episodes, paid directly to your provider, with no cap from Benecaster on how many you run. Bulk transcription lets you select and queue the whole catalog at once.

That sounds like the worse option and isn’t. A re-transcribed episode comes back with full word-level timestamps, which is what powers interactive click-to-jump playback — and generally better accuracy than the text inside your Castos PDF, which was itself machine-generated and then flattened into a page-layout format. You end up with a better transcript than the one you’re leaving behind, for less than the cost of a month of hosting.

Benecaster does not import PDF transcripts, and this is why: extracting text from a PDF loses the timestamps permanently, so it would give you a worse result than the $18 alternative while making you do more work to get it.

Benecaster exports transcripts as SRT, VTT, plain text, or PDF — standard formats you can take anywhere. The Transcription add-on also imports from services that do export properly — Rev, Descript, Sonix, or any provider that outputs SRT or VTT with timestamps intact. If your previous host emits <podcast:transcript> tags in their RSS feed (Buzzsprout, Transistor, Captivate, and others support Podcasting 2.0), the Migration Wizard can import transcripts for every episode automatically as part of migration — no per-file upload required. Castos does not currently emit these tags, so automatic import is not available for Castos migrants.