Turn any YouTube video into structured data,
instantly.
Transcripts, search, channels, playlists — one API, one key, one price. Ship in minutes instead of fighting YouTube's quota system for weeks.
Paste a URL.
Watch it parse.
No signup, no API key. Try a few of the sample videos below — every word, every timestamp, every segment streams from a real production endpoint.
Eight routes. One API key.
Same Bearer token, same JSON envelope, same error codes across every route. Authenticate once and you're done. Full parameters and response shapes are in the API reference.
Transcript
Pull the full transcript for any public YouTube video. Auto-generated or manual captions, in 100+ languages. Add ?translate_to=de to get an AI translation — any language, any video. Cache hits are free.
Search
Search YouTube by keyword and get structured results — video ID, title, channel, views, duration. Max 50 results per call. No YouTube Data API key required, no daily quota to burn through.
Channel videos
Pull every uploaded video from a channel by its ID. Returns video IDs, titles, and durations. Pair with /transcript to bulk-transcribe an entire channel in one loop.
Channel search
Search for videos within a specific channel. Great for finding topics inside large content libraries without scanning the whole platform.
Playlist
Expand any public playlist to its full ordered list of videos — IDs, titles, durations. Combine with /transcript to transcribe an entire course or podcast series in one go.
Subscribe
Watch a channel and get a POST to your own URL the moment it publishes something new. Checked every 15 minutes, so you stop writing polling loops.
Unsubscribe
Stop notifications for a channel. Same route, same key — no console, no dashboard round-trip.
Health
Liveness check for your own monitoring. The only route that needs no API key and never costs a credit.
Drop-in. Drop dead simple.
Native client libraries for the languages your team already uses. Or skip the SDK and hit the REST endpoint directly — it's just JSON over HTTPS.
# GET /transcript — returns segments with start, duration, text curl "https://api.transcriptapi.io/transcript?video_id=dQw4w9WgXcQ&language=en" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" # 200 OK # { # "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ", # "transcript": [ # { "start": 0.0, "duration": 3.5, "text": "We're no strangers to love" }, # { "start": 3.5, "duration": 3.0, "text": "You know the rules and so do I" } # ] # } # GET /search — up to 50 results per call curl "https://api.transcriptapi.io/search?q=machine+learning&limit=10" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"
Why not just use the official API?
YouTube's Data API was built for analytics dashboards, not for AI pipelines. Here's the comparison, from someone who has shipped against both.
| TranscriptAPI | YouTube Data API v3 | Roll your own scraper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transcript accessgetCaptions / fallback | ✓direct, all videos | ×OAuth + owner-only | ~brittle, breaks weekly |
| Quota / rate limitsrequests per day | ✓credit-based, predictable | ×10,000 units / day, opaque | ×IP bans, captchas |
| Searchcost per call | ✓1 credit / page | ×100 units / call (1% of daily) | ×HTML scraping |
| Latency p50global, cached | ✓184ms | ~400–900ms | ×2–8s headless browser |
| Setup timekey in hand → first call | ✓60 seconds | ~~30 min (GCP project + OAuth) | ×days, then ongoing |
| Cost at 1M calls / moall-in, fully loaded | ✓$249 flat | ×quota negotiation required | ×$2k+ proxies + maintenance |
Built for teams
shipping at scale.
Every kind of customer ends up here for the same reason — they need video data, structured, fast, without the ceremony.
Context for retrieval and agents
Feed every video your users paste into your RAG pipeline. Sub-200ms means transcripts arrive before the LLM finishes its first token.
Power video features without the overhead
Note-takers, summarizers, content-repurposing tools — ship the feature in a weekend instead of building a transcription team.
Corpus-scale extraction for academia
Pull every video from a channel, every channel in a vertical. Bulk pricing, compliant data handling, IRB-friendly logs.
Pay for credits.
Not for surprises.
One credit equals one transcript, one search page, or 100 playlist items. No per-seat fees, no overage gotchas, no annual contract pressure.
Free
No card required. Enough to evaluate every endpoint before you commit.
- All eight routes
- Community Discord support
- Public videos only
Production
25,000 credits included per month. Cancel any time.
- 25,000 credits / month included
- Priority email + Discord
- Channel webhooks included
- Failed calls refunded automatically
Enterprise
From 1M credits. Volume discounts kick in at 5M. Custom terms on request.
- 1,000,000+ credits
- Dedicated infra option
- Priority engineering support
- Custom invoicing
- Direct Slack channel
Need more? Top up anytime.
One-time credit bundles. Never expire, stack on top of any plan.
Questions, answered
without the marketing.
If something isn't here, ask in Discord — questions get answered there directly.
01How is this different from yt-dlp or youtube-transcript-api?+
02Do you support languages other than English?+
?translate_to=es parameter. Quality matches whatever YouTube serves natively.03What happens if a video doesn't have captions?+
source: "asr" field if it was machine-generated. ASR transcripts cost 4 credits instead of 1.