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: Download your Castos transcripts as PDFs and upload them directly into Benecaster’s transcript import panel — it accepts PDF files and extracts the text automatically. The transcript is stored, published to your episode page, and indexed for search. Interactive click-to-jump playback won’t work — that requires timestamps — but the transcript content is there.

For timestamped transcripts: Re-transcribe via the Transcription add-on. At roughly $0.18 per 30-minute episode, 100 back-catalog episodes costs about $18 in API fees. Benecaster has no monthly cap, so you can run the full batch at once rather than waiting for Castos’s per-month quota to reset.

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.