In short
YouTubeScribe is our free YouTube transcript generator. Paste a video link, pick a format and copy or download the transcript, with no account needed for a first transcript. It reads the caption track YouTube already has, supports 125+ languages, and the site shows 10,000+ active users and 1M+ transcripts generated. It runs on Next.js, Supabase and Cloudflare.
Last updated · Built under Dice Technologies, one of our ventures.
What was YouTubeScribe built to do?
People want the words from a YouTube video for all sorts of reasons: notes from a lecture, quotes from a podcast, subtitles for a re-upload, or source material for an article. YouTube's own transcript panel scrolls inside the player and is awkward to copy. YouTubeScribe's job is to turn a link into clean, selectable text or a subtitle file in a few seconds.
We also built it to grow through search. Each tool on the site answers one specific thing people look for, from a subtitle downloader to a chapters extractor, so the product and its search traffic grow together.
What did we build?
The main tool works in three steps: paste a link, pick a format, then copy or download. Watch pages, Shorts, youtu.be, embed and mobile share links all resolve to the same video. Around that we built:
- Free export to TXT and SRT with correct in and out times, timestamps you can switch on or off, and format changes that re-export without fetching the transcript again.
- Pro exports to VTT, Markdown and JSON, plus bulk export for whole playlists and channels.
- A language menu that only lists the caption tracks a video actually has, across 125+ languages.
- AI tools that can summarise or rewrite a transcript, or answer questions about it, paid for with credits that are only spent when a run succeeds.
- A library of 116 YouTube tools, as shown on the site, including a Shorts transcript downloader, a chapters extractor, a playlist exporter, a tag extractor and a thumbnail downloader. Each one is free on its first run.
- Comparison pages against other transcript tools, such as Tactiq, NoteGPT and DownSub.
What were the hard parts?
The tricky cases are the videos with no transcript to give. Private and members-only videos return nothing, and some uploads have no caption track at all: music-only videos, very short Shorts and some languages. We decided the tool should say so plainly instead of returning an empty file or generating text the speaker never said. A clear miss is more useful than a confident wrong answer.
Privacy shaped the design too. Extraction doesn't need a Google or YouTube login, and without an account the transcript goes straight to the browser instead of into a database. A free account adds saved history and collections, which the user can clear.
Speed matters for a tool people come back to again and again. The site states under three seconds for a ten-minute video and about twelve seconds for a three-hour one.
Which stack did we use, and why?
YouTubeScribe uses Next.js, Supabase, Cloudflare and PostHog. Next.js renders each tool page on the server, which matters for a site that depends on search traffic: every page needs its own indexable content, title and description. Supabase gives us a managed Postgres database for accounts and saved history. Cloudflare sits in front of the site for caching and protection, and PostHog shows us which tools people actually use.
What are the results so far?
As shown on the site, YouTubeScribe has 10,000+ active users and has generated 1M+ transcripts. Transcripts are free, and Free, Pro and Studio plans cover AI credits and the advanced export formats.
If you want a tool site that earns its traffic from search, our technical SEO and custom website work starts from the same approach: server-rendered pages, one clear job per page and clean internal links.
