YouTube Transcript API: Scrape Video Transcripts, No API Key
Pricing
Pay per event
Fetch the transcript of any public YouTube video, Short or embed as clean text, timed JSON, SRT or WebVTT. Manual captions first, auto-generated as fallback, clear error per video. Uses Apify residential proxy. $4 per 1,000 transcripts, MCP-ready.
YouTube video URLs or 11-character video IDs. Accepts watch, youtu.be, Shorts, embed and live links. Up to 1000 per run; duplicates are fetched and charged once.
Language codes in priority order, for example ["en", "en-GB", "de"]. For each language, human-made captions are used before auto-generated ones, and a code also matches its regional variants ("en" matches "en-US"; an exact match wins).
[ "en"]When none of your languages exist, return the transcript in the video's original spoken language (or the first available track) instead of a NoTranscriptFound error. The result's languageFallback field is true when this happened. Ignored when Translate to is set.
Optional language code. When set and the video has no track in this language, YouTube's own machine translation of the best available track is returned. YouTube currently rate-limits translated downloads heavily, so expect RequestBlocked errors for some videos.
segments: timed segments plus the full text. text: full text only. srt / vtt: subtitle file content plus the full text.
How many videos to fetch in parallel.
Defaults to Apify residential proxy, which is what makes YouTube requests succeed from the Apify cloud (YouTube blocks most datacenter IPs). Each request leaves from a new IP and blocked videos are retried automatically. Residential proxy usage is included in the per-transcript price.
{ "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": [ "RESIDENTIAL" ]}