Free tier

Free YouTube Transcript Generator (10 transcripts on signup)

A genuinely free YouTube transcript downloader. Paste a video, playlist, or channel URL, sign in with Google, and export 10 transcripts as plain TXT. No credit card, no trial expiration. Paid plans unlock SRT, JSON, CSV, DOCX, and Markdown for when you need timestamps or structured output.

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What you get on the free tier

Most free YouTube transcript tools either cripple output to plain text, cap you at a single video, or route you into an endless CAPTCHA loop the moment you paste a second URL. This free tier is built to avoid all three traps.

10 transcripts, no credit card. Sign in with Google once. No trial clock, no card on file, no surprise-charges email.
TXT export on free. Plain text output covers reading, search, and LLM ingestion. Upgrade to Starter ($9/mo) to unlock SRT, JSON, CSV, DOCX, and Markdown for timestamped and structured exports.
Full bulk support. Paste a channel or playlist URL and the tool pulls every video in one job, as long as the total fits inside your 10-transcript allowance.
Timestamps on paid plans. Starter and above add SRT, JSON, CSV, and Markdown with per-line timestamps — useful for quote attribution, video editing, and LLM chunking.
Multi-language support. If a video has captions in multiple languages, you can pick which track to pull. Auto-generated and manually uploaded captions both work.

Honest limits of the free tier

Being up front about what the free tier does not do is more useful than surprise limits mid-workflow. Here is the complete list.

10 transcripts total, not per month. This is a one-time allowance to try the tool. Once consumed, further exports require a paid plan. We do this intentionally — a recurring free allowance would cost more than the tool earns and we would rather keep the paid plans cheap.
No scheduled or recurring jobs. Repeat jobs and webhooks are paid-plan features. For one-off work, the free tier covers you.
No priority queue. Free-tier jobs run on the shared queue. In practice this is invisible — most exports finish in under 30 seconds even at peak — but paid tiers get priority routing if the queue spikes.
No AI summary features. AI summaries and chapter extraction are paid add-ons once they ship. The raw transcript is always available on every tier.

When to move to a paid plan

If any of these apply, the free tier will run out on you quickly and paid plans start at $9 a month with 1,000 transcripts per month included:

You are researching a topic that spans a dozen channels or more.
You are repurposing your own back catalog of 50+ videos into blog posts, SEO pages, or newsletter issues.
You have a recurring workflow — a weekly newsletter, a monthly report, a quarterly competitive scan — that needs fresh transcripts on a schedule.
You are building a product feature that hits the tool regularly from your own workflow automation.

The full pricing page breaks down the four tiers with per-transcript math. The short version: Starter at $9/month works for most serious users, Pro at $19/month fits power users running large back-catalog projects, and Business at $49/month covers teams pulling tens of thousands of transcripts a month.

How the free tier compares to other free options

There are three other paths to free YouTube transcripts, each with its own trade-off. The free tier here is designed to plug the gap between "totally free but painful" and "proper tool but paid."

YouTube's Show Transcript button. Fully free, no signup, but one video at a time and no export format. Fine for a single video; terrible for a channel.
yt-dlp. Free, open source, unlimited volume — if you have Python, a terminal, and patience for configuration. Most people do not.
Chrome extensions. Free, in-browser, quick for one-offs. They disappear from the Chrome Web Store regularly, rarely support bulk, and usually output TXT only.

Compared to those, the free tier here trades a one-time sign-in for bulk support, a sane web UI, and TXT output clean enough to drop straight into an LLM. Our full breakdown of every free option is in the free YouTube transcript generator roundup on the blog.

Who the free tier is really for

A journalist who needs three or four transcripts from a politician's channel for a story. A student capturing a lecture series so they can search it during exam prep. A creator testing whether a tool fits into their content workflow before committing to a monthly fee. A developer prototyping a feature and wanting to confirm the output shape before wiring up a paid API. If you are in any of those shoes, 10 transcripts is enough to finish the job or make a confident decision.

If you have already burned through free tools and ended up back here because copy-pasting 50 caption panels is its own punishment, the free tier is also for you. You will know within the first three exports whether this is the tool you want to stand up a workflow on.

How to start

Open the YouTube video transcript homepage.
Paste a YouTube video, playlist, or channel URL into the input.
Sign in with Google — takes two clicks.
Free gets TXT; upgrade to pick SRT, JSON, CSV, DOCX, or Markdown.
Click download. Your ZIP arrives in seconds.

Frequently asked questions

Is this YouTube transcript tool actually free?

Yes. Sign in with Google and you get 10 transcripts with no credit card and no trial clock. The free tier exports plain TXT, which covers most reading, search, and LLM use cases. Starter ($9/month) and above unlock SRT, JSON, CSV, DOCX, and Markdown — pick whichever paid tier matches your monthly volume.

Why do I have to sign in with Google for the free tier?

Sign-in is how we meter the free tier without CAPTCHA walls, IP rate limits, or browser fingerprinting. Google is the least-friction option — no password to set, no email verification loop. You can preview channels and playlists without signing in to confirm the tool works for your use case; sign-in only kicks in when you actually run an export.

Can I use the free tier for a whole YouTube channel?

You can run a bulk channel or playlist job on the free tier, but each video counts as one transcript against your 10-transcript allowance. A channel with 8 videos fits comfortably; a 100-video channel would need a paid plan. The preview step shows you the video count before any credits are spent, so you can select a subset that fits.

When does the free tier stop being enough?

Three signals: you are pulling more than 10 transcripts in a month, you need to re-run the same channel on a schedule, or you want to build the tool into a workflow rather than a one-off. Any of those point to a paid plan. Starter at $9/month covers 1,000 transcripts per month and is the honest upgrade path for most users — the math works out to under a cent per transcript.

Do free transcripts include timestamps? Which formats are available?

The free tier exports TXT only — plain prose without per-line timestamps. That covers reading, text search, and feeding transcripts into an LLM. If you need timestamps (SRT for subtitling, JSON or CSV for LLM chunking, DOCX for document workflows, Markdown for Obsidian or Notion), upgrade to Starter at $9/month — it unlocks all six formats and 1,000 transcripts/month.

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