YouTube Channel & Playlist Transcripts — Bulk Subtitles

Paste a channel or a playlist. Get every video's transcript, timestamped and clean. No API key, no cookies, no quota.

Free tier — free transcripts on every run

The first 5 transcripts of every run are free, on every run you ever make. Point it at a channel and read real transcripts before you are billed.

Beyond that you pay $0.001 per transcript, and only for transcripts actually delivered to your dataset — a video with no captions is never billed.

One guard: the free allowance never covers more than half of a run, so a 10-video run gets 5 free. Bulk runs are where the free tier pays off.

Why this one

Transcript scrapers make you supply the video URLs. If you want a whole channel, that is a scraping job before the scraping job.

This Actor takes the channel or playlist itself and does the rest:

1. Resolves it through YouTube's own feed — @handle, channel URL, channel ID or playlist URL all work.
2. Removes duplicates across every source you listed, so a video that sits in both a channel and one of its playlists is transcribed and billed once.
3. Pulls each transcript, preferring human-written subtitles over auto-generated ones.
4. Attaches the publication date and view count from the feed — the player alone does not know them, and they are what let you rank a back catalogue.

What you pass

Form	Example
Handle	@3blue1brown
Channel URL	https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium
Channel ID	UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw
Playlist URL	https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi
Playlist ID	PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi

Output

One row per video — the transcript fields, plus where it came from:

{
  "video_id": "aircAruvnKk",
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network?",
  "channel": "3Blue1Brown",
  "published_at": "2017-10-05T15:11:00+00:00",
  "views": 19204471,
  "language": "en",
  "is_generated": false,
  "duration_seconds": 1105.64,
  "word_count": 3357,
  "text": "Full transcript as one clean string …",
  "segments": [{ "start": 12.4, "duration": 3.1, "text": "Let me start with a question." }]
}

Turn Include timestamped segments off if you only want text — useful when you are paying an LLM per token.

Good to know

• YouTube's feed publishes the 15 most recent videos of a channel. That is YouTube's limit, not ours. To go deeper, list the channel's playlists — a channel's own "all videos" playlist works too.
• Hard cost cap. Set maxTotalChargeUsd and the run can never bill above it.
• A video without captions is never billed. It is reported in source_errors with code NO_TRANSCRIPT and costs you nothing.
• Proxy included. YouTube blocks datacenter IPs; the default Apify Proxy setting handles it.

Typical uses

• Index an entire channel for RAG or search
• Turn a conference playlist into articles, notes or a newsletter
• Analyse what a competitor actually says across their catalogue
• Build a training or evaluation corpus from a curated playlist

Related scrapers

Same data, other sources — all with the same free tier, the same clean schema and the same pay-only-for-what-you-get billing:

Actor
YouTube Transcript API — Subtitles & Captions in Any Language
YouTube Search Scraper - Videos, Views & Channels
YouTube Channel Videos Scraper - Views & Velocity
Company Careers & ATS Jobs API - Workday, Greenhouse
Google Search Results Scraper - SERP Positions
Google Maps Business Scraper - Places & Contacts