Show HN: Junco, turn newsletters into short audio episodes

[alex-onecard]

Hey HN, I released my app Junco today to the iOS app store. Junco turns your newsletters emails and RSS feeds into short 2-5 minute podcast style episodes. You can listen to them while walking, commuting, showering, etc.

You can connect your gmail account to have them auto generated each day or use the email we give you. You also have the option to follow RSS feeds in the app "discover" section. Gmail access is read-only for only the senders you approve. This was one of the biggest hurdles as it requires a CASA level 2 security audit which was quite tedious and expensive ($750!!) but it was worth it for peace of mind.

Its free to try with a 3 day trial and then $5/month thereafter. My goal with this was not to replace reading but to help me follow the newsletters I already subscribe to daily and enable me to consume more diverse content that I don't have the time to read. Each episode includes a reader view back to the source article for those wanting further reading.

Would love any and all feedback on this, especially to those who have a lot of newsletter subscriptions. I'm happy to discuss any and all of the technical details of this application: railway, fastapi, swift, cloudflare, app store review process etc.

[jsh1]

What's your per-episode LLM + TTS cost against the $5/mo?

[alex-onecard]

LLM summaries are basically free, its the TTS where the costs add up. Currently its ~.03 cents per episode. That is a number I've been happy with while running our beta testing. I found that power users were eating up nearly all or sometimes a tiny bit more than $5/month in costs but on average users were typically under that putting me in profit.

There is still a lot more optimizations that I have planned to bring that TTS cost down more. With scale I think I would buy out server space for running TTS models but at current volume API makes more sense and is not cost prohibitive to me.

[dev1398]

always wanted something like this! very simple and to the point. Well done !!

[alex-onecard]

Thanks, hope you find value in it