Lower Street alternative: an honest comparison

Start here, because for a large share of the people reading this it settles the question.

**If you're starting from a blank page, they're better.** Designing a show properly — deciding what it's actually for, who it's aimed at, what format carries the idea, what it sounds like in the first fifteen seconds — is a genuine discipline, and it's the part most companies get wrong on their own. Lower Street sell that as a core capability. We don't sell it at all. A buyer who hires us with no format in mind will get well-produced episodes of a show that hasn't worked out what it is, which is a waste of everyone's money.

**If you want narrative or scripted work, they're better.** A documentary-style series with a script, archive, sound design and a producer shaping a story arc is a different craft from editing an interview well. Lower Street list narrative podcasting as a specialism. We don't do it, and a studio that claims every capability is telling you something about how carefully it describes the rest.

**If you're buying inside a large organisation, they're easier to justify.** A team of 30+ with Adobe, PepsiCo, Morgan Stanley, BCG and Lloyds Bank on the roster de-risks an internal recommendation in a way a small studio simply cannot. That's not a marketing point — procurement, legal review, and the question "who else have you done this for at our scale?" are real obstacles, and they clear them. If your show is a board-visible investment, that matters more than a per-episode rate.

**If you need capacity guarantees across multiple shows,** a 30-person team absorbs a launch, a live event and a schedule change in the same month. A small studio can't do all three at once, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.

There's also a fair point to make about their pricing. Not publishing rates is often a red flag, but Lower Street do at least characterise where they sit — describing themselves as probably "more than a freelance editor and less than a big agency". That's more candour than most agencies offer, and it's a useful sentence for working out quickly whether you're in the right conversation.

The case for us is narrower, and it rests on one distinction: **whether your show needs designing or producing.**

**Your format is settled and the work is now execution.** If you know who hosts it, who it's for, how long it runs and what it sounds like, the strategy component of an agency programme is capability you're paying for and not using. What you need instead is for the edit to be right, the loudness consistent, the notes written, the clips cut and the episode published — on time, indefinitely. That's the entire job we do.

**You want to know the price before the call.** Our rates are published: £110 per episode for audio editing, £165 for audio and video, £335 for full production including show notes, artwork, clips and publishing. You can work out your annual cost in about a minute without speaking to anyone. Six of the nine agencies we looked at while researching this page publish nothing at all, and a discovery call is an expensive way to find out you're not in range.

**You want the person editing your show, not an account manager.** At a 30-person agency the person who sells you the work is rarely the person who does it — that's not a criticism, it's how agencies function at scale. With us there's no relay: you send a note about episode forty and the person who cut it reads it. The trade is that there's nobody to escalate to, which is a real limitation if that matters to you.

**You need consistency across a long run, in a technical subject.** This is where we're genuinely strong and it's evidenced rather than asserted. The Genetics Podcast has run to 248 episodes with guests from Cambridge researchers to biotech CEOs; The Bitcoin Collective has published weekly since 2021 without a gap and holds 4.8/5 on Apple Podcasts. Episode 200 sitting correctly next to episode 12 is a process problem, and it's the one we've solved most often.

**You want to start without committing.** No minimum term. Per-episode if you're testing, monthly if you're settled. For a show that might not exist in a year — which is most new shows — that flexibility is worth more than a lower unit price.

**We work inside your setup, not alongside it.** This is the difference clients mention most and the hardest one to see from a website. Slack, Notion, Monday, WhatsApp, email — whatever your marketing team already runs on, we join it rather than adding another tool and another standing meeting. In practice the person editing your show sits in the same channel as the people planning the campaign, so a question about episode forty gets answered in minutes instead of becoming a scheduled call. What you end up with is closer to a producer on the team than a supplier at the end of an email chain.

**We've had a client leave for a larger agency and come back.** That is the honest version of this argument and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. Scale reads well on a proposal — more people, more capability, more reassurance — and what tends to get missed until you have lived with it is the proximity: being able to ask a question and have it answered by the person actually doing the work, rather than routed through someone whose job is to route it. We would much rather you weighed that up front than discovered it a quarter in. For some teams the capacity is worth the distance, and that is a fair trade to make deliberately.

**You get the podcasting experience, not just the episodes.** Being that close to your team means the questions that come up around a show — what your download numbers actually mean, whether a sponsorship offer is worth taking, why a platform isn't showing your chapters, how to handle a back-catalogue migration — get answered as part of the relationship rather than scoped as consultancy. That is years of production experience available to your team directly, and it is a real part of what you are buying even though nobody puts it on a rate card.

**And it makes us quick when it actually matters.** With no queue and no account layer between you and the person doing the work, an urgent episode can move immediately — we have turned one around in under twelve hours when a client needed it to ship. That is not a standing promise on every episode, and it is genuinely hard for a larger operation to offer at all, because at scale work has to be scheduled in advance. It is a real advantage of buying from a small studio, and worth weighing against the capacity a bigger team gives you.