# 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.

## What's the best way to ask ChatGPT?

Setup line (paste into any agent): `set up treg — https://treg.to/llms.txt`

Then ask: "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."

- **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 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 and it picks, or you tell it how.

### Which YouTube transcript API is cheapest?

- Cheapest per call: ScrapeCreators at $0.00188 (`scrapecreators.x.v1-youtube-video-transcript`)
- Cheapest per found: TikHub at $0.008 (`tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-captions`)

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?

- ScrapeCreators: 98% over 83 calls, 2.5s median

Measured on treg.to traffic; not a controlled benchmark.

### How do the providers compare?

| Provider | Price | Accepts | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapeCreators | $0.00188 per call | url, language, cache_max_age | unverified |
| TikHub | $0.008 per found | video_id, video_url, language_code, format | 2026-07-28 |

Endpoints:

- `scrapecreators.x.v1-youtube-video-transcript`: treg call scrapecreators.x.v1-youtube-video-transcript --query url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjVIDXPP7Uk
- `tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-captions`: treg call tikhub.x.youtube-web-v2-get-video-captions --query video_id=dQw4w9WgXcQ --query video_url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ --query language_code=en --query format=srt

## 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1fgjjd1/looking_for_a_saas_tool_to_fetch_youtube_video/)

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/sideprojects/comments/1v4zk6t/is_there_a_stable_way_to_pull_youtube_transcripts/)

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/n8n/comments/1pd5gbx/turn_any_youtuber_into_an_ai_agent_001run_using/)

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: https://x.com/i/status/2087026783615168992)

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1uq73nr/youtube_transcript_getter_extension_for_obsidian/)

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.


## 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.

## 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

**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.

HTML version: https://treg.to/use-cases/youtube-video/get-a-video-s-transcript