YouTube transcript API without an API key

How to do it in 4 steps

Paste video links into Video URLs, or @handles and playlist URLs into Channels and playlists.
Optional: set Preferred languages (for example en, es).
Click Start, or call the Actor from the Apify API with your Apify token: no YouTube API key, cookies or login.
Each video comes back with transcript and timestamped segments; export as JSON, CSV or Excel. 100 videos cost $0.30.

Specifics

Input	Video URLs, channel `@handles` and playlist URLs; public videos only
Output	Full transcript, timestamped segments, video details, the language returned and whether it came from manual captions, auto captions or speech-to-text
Price	$3 per 1,000 transcripts; no start fee
Videos without captions	Optional speech-to-text (Whisper large-v3-turbo) at $0.008 per audio minute, off by default
Limits	Up to 500 videos per run (default 100), up to 500 per channel or playlist (default 20)
Measured speed	About 20 videos per minute with captions (100 videos in about 5–6 minutes)

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key or an account?

No. You only need an Apify account to start the run; no YouTube API key, cookies or login.

Which caption is returned when there are several?

With languages set, the first language that exists, manual before auto-generated. Without languages, the video's original language (manual if available).

Is speech-to-text accurate?

It is Whisper large-v3-turbo. On our English samples the word error rate against human captions was 2–5%; names and rare terms are the usual mistakes.

Related guides

How to transcribe a podcast to SRT subtitles

Prices, limits and test results from the YouTube Transcript Scraper README on Apify. Prices are the base (Free plan) prices on Apify; larger Apify plans pay less. Actor page: apify.com/tidytools/youtube-transcript.