About YouTube
A hosted API and MCP server that returns the transcript of a public YouTube video as clean JSON, from wherever your code runs.
What it is
YouTubeTranscriptAPI is a REST API for YouTube transcripts. You send a video ID or URL with your API key and get back the captions as timestamped segments or plain text. The same API searches YouTube, lists a channel's uploads or a playlist's videos, and resolves channel handles, so a pipeline can go from “this channel” to “every transcript” without a scraper of its own.
The same tools are available through a hosted MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code and other AI apps can read YouTube videos after you sign in once.
Who it's for
Developers and builders who need transcripts inside something they run: a backend on AWS, Google Cloud or Vercel, a Lambda or Cloud Run function, a Colab notebook, an AI agent, or an n8n or Make automation.
Many of them started with the open-source youtube-transcript-api Python library. It works on a laptop, but YouTube blocks most requests that come from cloud IP addresses, so the same code fails in production with RequestBlocked or IpBlocked. The usual fixes are rotating residential proxies or a server at home. YouTubeTranscriptAPI replaces that with one HTTPS call.
How it works
- Your code calls our API. We fetch the captions from our own infrastructure, built to reach YouTube reliably, so your server's IP address never talks to YouTube and can't be blocked.
- Every transcript is stored after its first fetch. A video not fetched before usually takes 10–30 seconds; videos already fetched return in about a second.
- Responses have the same JSON shape every time, documented in the API reference and an OpenAPI spec.
- Only successful calls cost credits; errors are never charged. You start with 100 free credits and no card, and plans start at $7 a month. See pricing.
- It works with public videos that have captions. Private or removed videos, and videos without captions, return a 404.
Who runs it
YouTubeTranscriptAPI is an independent service. It is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC.
What changed recently is in the changelog.
Contact
Questions, bug reports, feature requests or higher limits: use the contact form or email hello@youtubetranscriptapi.com. A person reads every message.