treg.to / Use cases / YouTube & video
2 providers · from $0.00188 per call · $0.000 markup

YouTube transcript API: a video's captions as plain text

Give your agent a YouTube URL and get the spoken words back as text, ready to summarise, search or quote. 2 providers do this through one treg.to key, from $0.00188 a video. The official YouTube Data API cannot do it for a video you do not own, which is the whole reason this job has a price at all.
Start freeSee the comparison
$1.00 of free credit on every new team · no provider signup · no card
1 of 2 endpoints on this page are live-verified against the provider.
compared on this page
ScrapeCreatorsTikHub
The economics

What 100 of these actually costs

the wide end
$0.80
TikHub, the dearest here, for the same 100
→
you pay
$0.19
100 × $0.00188 at ScrapeCreators, metered per call

Subscription figures are provider list prices recorded in treg.to’s own catalog grid; per-call prices are what treg.to charges today, with $0.000 added.

Try it

What’s the best way to ask ChatGPT?

1Set your agent up, once
in your agent's chat
set up treg — https://treg.to/llms.txt
2Ask for the job
the prompt
Using treg, get the transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ in English. Show me the price first, then summarise it into five bullet points.
works in
ChatGPTClaudeClaude CodeCodexCursorGemini CLI

Why this prompt works

Give it the URL

Both providers take a watch or Shorts URL. No video id lookup first.

Name the language

Ask for a language you know the video carries, or you get an empty result.

Ask for the price first

treg.to returns the cost before the call, so the agent can say what it will spend.

Say what to do with it

Transcript plus instruction in one turn beats fetching then pasting.

Why treg.to

Why go through treg.to

One key, not 9 accounts

treg.to holds the provider keys. Neither you nor the agent sees them.

Price before the call

The provider's own rate, $0.000 markup, from a prepaid balance.

No subscription, no seats

Charged per call. $1.00 free per new team, no card to start.

Your own keys are free

Already pay Hunter? Register it and those calls are never metered.

Switch by changing a word

Another provider is a different word in the prompt, not a new integration.

Nothing to integrate

No SDK, no OAuth dance per vendor, no seats.

Behind the scenes

What ChatGPT sees before it calls

treg.to does not choose for you. It hands ChatGPT this comparison, with the price shown before any call, and ChatGPT picks. Or you tell it how: "cheapest", "most reliable", "the one that takes what I have", or a provider by name.

Which YouTube transcript API is cheapest?

Cheapest per call

ScrapeCreatorsScrapeCreators at $0.00188

Cheapest per found

TikHubTikHub at $0.008

Those units are not interchangeable: one call can return many results, so compare on the unit you will actually be billed in.

Which one is the most reliable?

ProviderSuccessMedianSample
ScrapeCreatorsScrapeCreators98%2.5s82 calls
Measured on treg.to traffic: real calls, real inputs, and sample sizes differ by provider. Live reliability, not a controlled benchmark.

How do the providers compare?

ProviderPriceAcceptsSuccess rateVerified
ScrapeCreatorsScrapeCreators$0.00188 per callurl, language, cache_max_age98% (82 calls)unverified
TikHubTikHub$0.008 per foundvideo_id, video_url, language_code, format (2 calls)2026-07-28

Run one

the cheapest verified call
treg call scrapecreators.x.v1-youtube-video-transcript --query url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjVIDXPP7Uk

Swap the id for any provider above. All 2 endpoints behind this job, with their parameters and captured responses, are on the YouTube shelf.

How these numbers are made

PricesEach provider’s own published rate, converted to US dollars for one chargeable event of the unit they bill in. treg.to adds $0.000. Where a provider bills in credits, the conversion uses the rate on their public pricing page, last checked 2026-07-28.
Success ratetreg.to’s own served calls over the last 30 days: 2xx counts as a success, 5xx and timeouts as a failure. A 4xx is excluded, because it usually means the caller sent bad parameters and one bad query should not make a healthy endpoint look broken.
What this is notA controlled benchmark. These are real calls with real inputs, so sample sizes and the difficulty of what was asked differ by provider. Treat the rates as live reliability, not a like-for-like test.
VerifiedThe date treg.to last called the endpoint end to end and confirmed the shape of its response and the price it charged.
From the field

What people actually struggle with

This job has a large and unusually honest literature, because everyone starts by doing it themselves. From ~180 Reddit and X posts in August 2026, after excluding thirteen vendor and self-promotion clusters that were roughly half the corpus, these five recur.

It works on a laptop and stops working on a server

“When I try to run it in the cloud, YouTube seems to block the IP.” r/SaaS, 5 points

What this page can do about it: This is the single most repeated failure in the research, and it is structural: the unofficial route reads from your address, and datacentre ranges get blocked. A call through treg.to leaves the provider's infrastructure instead. What no table can tell you is whether a given provider's pool is clear today at your volume, which is why the observed success rates on this page are measured rather than promised.

Nobody can promise it still works next month

“it still feels like the whole feature could break the moment something changes on YouTube's end” r/sideprojects, 5 points

What this page can do about it: Correct, and no comparison table can tell you otherwise. The honest difference is who owns the repair: on the unofficial route it is you, at the moment it breaks, and here it is the provider, with the failure showing up as a billing line rather than an outage.

The proxy is the real cost of doing it yourself

“it needs ip address rotations (becuase youtube blocks transcript scrapers), so I set up a webshare proxy (costs like $3)” r/n8n, 285 points

What this page can do about it: A fair benchmark, and worth doing the arithmetic against: a proxy is a monthly floor you pay whether or not you pull a transcript, plus the maintenance. The prices here are per video with no floor, which wins at low volume and loses at very high volume.

An agent cannot watch a video, so the transcript is the adapter

“What's the best way to have an agent via API in my app auto-generate a transcript from a YouTube video” @waynesutton on X

What this page can do about it: This framing was the largest single theme in the research, twelve posts. It is one call here: the agent turns a URL into text and then does the actual work in the same turn, which is what the prompt at the top of this page does.

The DIY integrations people build for this keep not sticking

“I built a couple of MCPs using APIs etc, but they didn't work out so well for pulling transcripts.” r/OpenAI, 25 points

What this page can do about it: Worth being precise about why, because it is not the MCP part. It is that the transcript source underneath was unofficial. Nothing here changes that for the two paid providers; what changes is that maintaining it is their job, and you can compare what they charge for the video where it fails.

The detail

What actually differs

Google's own Data API is missing from this comparison on purpose.

Its captions.download method only works on videos the connected account owns, so it cannot read anyone else's, and that is why a job the platform does for free in the player costs money here.

ScrapeCreators takes a cache_max_age parameter: if a cached copy is newer than the number of days you pass, it returns that for 0 credits instead of scraping again.

On a rerun over the same videos, this is the difference between paying and not.

Ask for a language the video actually has.

ScrapeCreators returns transcript: null when your two-letter code is missing rather than falling back; TikHub returns the list of available caption tracks if you send no language code at all, which is the safer first call.

Background

What is a YouTube transcript API?

It returns the caption track YouTube already holds for a video: the auto-generated one the speech recogniser produced, or the human-uploaded one if the channel added it. You get the text, usually with timestamps, in SRT, plain text or JSON. It is not transcription; nobody here is running speech recognition on the audio, so a video with no caption track has nothing to return.

Questions

Before you start

How much does a YouTube transcript cost?

A fraction of a cent per video at the provider's own rate, with $0.000 added by treg.to. The live prices are in the comparison above, and one provider bills only on success while the other bills the attempt.

Why not use youtube-transcript-api myself?

You can, and it works until it does not: the library reads an undocumented endpoint from your IP, and datacentre ranges get blocked, which is the failure everybody hits at the point they move off a laptop. These providers run their own IP pools, and the failure becomes a billing line instead of an outage.

Does this work on Shorts and live streams?

Shorts, yes; both providers accept a Shorts URL. A live stream only has captions once the recording is processed, and a video whose channel disabled captions has no track to return at any price.

Can I get transcripts in bulk?

Yes, it is one call per video and you tell your agent the list. There is no batch endpoint, so the cost is linear, and the billing unit in the comparison tells you which of the two charges for a video that turns out to have no captions.