YouTube Transcript & Subtitles Scraper API
Pricing
$2.50 / 1,000 transcripts
Get YouTube transcripts and captions from videos, playlists and channels as timed segments, plain text, SRT or VTT. Many languages, an auto-generated fallback and video metadata. Each failed video gets a clear error row and the run never hangs. Built for AI and RAG pipelines.
Fix round 2 after the second independent review. Not yet published.
> (-->, --->, ---->) in cue text becomes ->, so cue text can never look like a timing line.listingBodyBytes). The warning above 150 KB applies from the first video.tubetext-state, so a run whose key-less player call is refused tries the saved key before it reads a 340 KB watch page. A refused saved key is dropped. New stat savedApiKeyLoaded. The run log warns when a watch page was needed.Fix round 1 after the independent review. Not yet published.
video event at $0.0025 per saved transcript. The playlist-item event is gone, so a video from a playlist or channel costs the same as a direct one, and its error row is free.% escape in an @handle URL gives an INVALID_INPUT row instead of failing the run. A caption track that needs a proof-of-origin token is no longer retried.responseBodyBytes, responseBodyKBPerVideo, watchPageFetches and videosNotStarted. A traffic guard stops the run above 400 KB per video on average.LIVE_NOT_FINISHED. The README now says that an ended stream without a recording gives VIDEO_UNPLAYABLE. Language matching respects scripts, so zh-TW no longer takes a zh-Hans track and sr-Latn no longer takes sr-Cyrl. WebVTT cue text escapes &, < and >, and SRT writes --> in text as ->. Only formatting tags are stripped, so literal text like a < b > c is kept.First version, built and tested locally and not yet published.
The engine (src/engine/) has no Apify imports, so it can later back an npm CLI and an MCP server.