jesthandbook.com is coming along nicely, will be ready for release some time in January.
Would that work with your audience?

I've made a couple of deals, apart from the hand-wavy "find the highest price they're willing to pay you're also happy with".

I usually calculate the starting price using CPM (cost per mille ie. cost per 1000 views) and adjust up/down depending on eg. how likely the number of eyeballs is likely to go up.

This works for both your website and your newsletter.

A decent CPM for a website could be $3-5 up to maybe $10 CPM (remember that whatever the CPM, more eyeballs -> higher price). Newsletter is probably from $7-10 up to double digits as a CPM.

Podcast Addict

Only Google knows 😂😂

Pretty sure adding to Search Console helps

Easy to set up, backed by git 👍👍👍

Frontend: Vue, handlebars or static HTML (maybe built with a static site generator)
Backend: Express/Node (goto) or netlify lambda (trying this out)
Hosting: now.sh, netlify, cloudflare (CDN)
Database: Postgres, Airtable

Still looking for good (cheap) database hosting, I might have a look at spinning up a Dokku instance on DigitalOcean.

There's cool UIs to monitor the queues as well, I've got an example of a working setup at github.com/HugoDF/express-bul… (post explaining what's going on at codewithhugo.com/bring-redux-…).

Bull is the only queue with a modern interface (ie Promises) that I found when digging around.

Let me know if you get stuck anywhere.

You should try using a queue eg. Bull queue.
You can run the workers on the same server or somewhere else (it's backed by redis).
Not sure if it 100% fits your use case since as far as I understand you seem to want to wait for the job to complete before sending a response back or something? In which case you should wait on the output of the queued job (that writes to a db or something)