Get a YouTube transcript API key.

One key, one bearer token, one credit for each caption track you name. Here is what the key buys, what it can call, and where the product stands today.

Private preview

The isolated staging service answers requests, but the production API is not live. Credit prices are not decided. The v1 contract is frozen at 1.0.0-draft.1, and the demo on the home page runs on sample data.

What one credit buys

The billing unit is one completed selected track. A cached track and a freshly extracted track cost the same, because you asked for the same work.

  • One credit for a completed transcript in the track you named.
  • Zero for a failed request, so a private or caption-free video costs nothing.
  • Zero for polling, for every download format, and for webhook delivery.
  • Zero for a cancellation that lands before the extraction commits.

Repeating a request with the same Idempotency-Key and the same body returns the original transcript and does not charge a second credit.

What the key can call

  • Exact track selection by language and caption kind, or by an observed track_id.
  • JSON, plain text, SRT, and WebVTT, all derived from one normalized segment model.
  • Batches of up to 1,000 explicit video inputs, with cursor-paged item results.
  • Usage records for 12 months, and terminal transcript and batch resources for 30 days.
  • Account-scoped webhook endpoints that carry a resource reference, never transcript text.

Keys are named and scoped, and they never appear in a URL, a query string, or a webhook payload. The dashboard issues, rotates, and revokes them.

What you can use today

The public demo runs the selection flow against sample data. The API reference is generated from the frozen v1 contract. The full service runs only in isolated staging.

Try the demoRead the API docs

What has to land before keys go out

These are the open items on the product record, not a roadmap with dates. Nothing here is scheduled, and none of it is billable until it passes its gate.

  • A live WorkOS signup, recovery, first-session, and first-key proof.
  • A larger multi-exit soak that measures throughput before any production account limit is published.
  • The payment provider, credit grants, and paid credit prices, which are still undecided.
  • A production API deployment on the custom domain, with a tested rollback path.