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.
Sample output for four videos, in the shape the API returns it. To run your own video, use the free transcript tool: no signup, no API key.
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 up to 200 of a channel's most recent uploads by its ID. Returns video IDs, titles, and durations. Pair with /transcript to bulk-transcribe a channel's recent uploads 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 the first page of its videos, about 100, in order — IDs, titles, durations. Combine with /transcript to transcribe a course or podcast series in one go.
Subscribe
Watch a channel and get a POST to your own URL within about 15 minutes of a new upload. One best-effort call per upload, 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.
No SDK needed: plain HTTP from the languages your team already uses. 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 |
| 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. Cached transcripts come back in milliseconds; a first fetch takes a few seconds.
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 a channel's recent uploads, or every channel in a vertical. Cached repeats are free and failed calls are refunded.
Pay for credits.
Not for surprises.
One credit equals one transcript, one search page, or one channel or playlist listing. 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
- Email + Discord support
- Channel webhooks (free on every plan)
- Failed calls refunded automatically
Enterprise
1,000,000 credits included per month. Need more, or an invoice instead of card billing? Email hello@transcriptapi.io.
- 1,000,000 credits / month included
- Email + Discord support
- Channel webhooks (free on every plan)
- Failed calls refunded automatically
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 translates the captions with an AI model, so quality follows the source captions and the model.03What happens if a video doesn't have captions?+
404 with retryable: false, and the credit is refunded automatically.