Video Transcript API - 100% Free
Pricing
Pay per usage
Video Transcript API - 100% Free
Completely free - no charge per transcript, ever. Convert any YouTube video to text: full transcript plus timestamped segments, ready for summarisation, RAG pipelines and AI agents. Reads YouTube's own first-party endpoint - no API key, no cookies, nothing that expires.
Pricing
Pay per usage
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Developer
omar khandji
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Video Transcript API — YouTube to Text, 100% Free
A developer-first video transcript API: pass YouTube videos, get back clean text and timestamped segments. Built for summarisation, RAG pipelines and AI agents.
100% free
This Actor is free. There is no charge per transcript and no charge per run from us — you pay only Apify's own platform usage for the run, exactly as you would for any Actor you wrote yourself.
It is free because it costs us nothing to operate: it reads YouTube's own first-party endpoint, so there is no upstream scraper to pay for. No API key, no cookies, nothing that expires.
What you get per video
text— the full transcript as one clean string, ready to feed an LLMsegments— every caption line withstartandduration, for players, subtitles or chunked RAG ingestionlanguageand whether the captions are human-written or auto-generated — human-written is always preferred when both existword_count,video_id,title
Input
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
videos | Video URLs or IDs — watch links, youtu.be, Shorts, embeds or bare 11-character IDs, mixed freely |
language | Preferred two-letter caption language (en, fr, es, …). Empty = English, then the video default |
includeSegments | Set false for plain text only |
proxyConfiguration | Defaults to the Apify proxy — YouTube blocks datacenter IPs, so leave it on |
Call it as a live API
This Actor runs in Standby: the container is already up, so an HTTP request answers in seconds — no cold start.
Or POST the same JSON you would use as run input. The answer is JSON with
transcripts, per-video source_errors, and totals.
For AI agents (MCP)
The same endpoint speaks the Model Context Protocol at /mcp. Agents get one
tool, video_transcript, that converts a video to text in a single call —
usable from Claude, Cursor and any MCP client.
Honest failure modes
A video with captions disabled returns a NO_TRANSCRIPT source error, not a
crash and not an empty string pretending to be a transcript. Invalid references
return INVALID_VIDEO with the reason. You are never billed for a failure —
there is nothing to bill, everything is free.
The rest of the family
- YouTube Transcript Scraper — the same engine, transcript-first wording
- YouTube Channel & Playlist Transcripts — whole channels in bulk, $1/1K
Support
Found a bug or have a feature request? Use the Issues tab on this Actor's Apify Store page, or message the author (om_kh) directly through Apify — every report gets a reply.
