Supadata Alternatives for Video Transcripts: APIs and Free Tools

November 8, 2026

Supadata turns video URLs into transcripts. It is a capable product, and for some workloads it is the cheapest option. This post covers what it offers, then the alternatives: free open-source tools, speech-to-text APIs and multi-platform data APIs, each with its real limits.

Supadata today

• Plans from a free tier of 100 credits a month up to $897 a month for 1,000,000 credits. The $47 Mega plan has 30,000 credits.
• A native transcript costs 1 credit. For videos without captions, an AI-generated transcript costs 2 credits per minute.
• Credits do not roll over.
• It lists YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X videos.

Its AI transcription for videos with no captions is a real strength. If you transcribe a steady volume every month, its per-credit price at Mega is lower than many alternatives.

First question: do the videos have captions?

Every transcript tool does one of two things. It reads captions the platform already has, which is cheap and fast, or it runs speech-to-text on the audio, which costs more and takes longer. Check a sample of your videos first. Most YouTube videos have auto-generated captions; short-form platforms vary.

The alternatives

youtube-transcript-api

A Python library that needs no API key or browser and handles auto-generated captions and translation. Its README says it uses an undocumented part of YouTube and that YouTube blocks most IPs belonging to cloud providers. It is great on a laptop and unreliable on a server.

pip install youtube-transcript-api
youtube_transcript_api dQw4w9WgXcQ --languages en

yt-dlp

The standard command-line downloader. To fetch captions without the video:

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs --sub-langs en --sub-format vtt "VIDEO_URL"

You get a VTT file with timestamps. Strip the timing lines for plain text.

Official YouTube API

The captions endpoint is for channel owners: captions.download requires permission to edit the video. It is the right tool for your own channel and not for anyone else's.

Whisper and AssemblyAI

When there are no captions, you need speech-to-text. Whisper runs locally under the MIT license, from the tiny model at about 1 GB of VRAM to the large one at about 10 GB. AssemblyAI is a hosted option priced per audio hour. Both need the audio file, so use them on media you have the rights to process.

How to choose

• Your own YouTube channel: the official API.
• A few hundred YouTube videos from your own machine: youtube-transcript-api or yt-dlp.
• Videos with no captions: Supadata's AI mode, Whisper or AssemblyAI.
• Transcripts from many platforms in a server or agent, plus the video's stats and comments: a multi-platform data API.
• Steady, high monthly volume on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram: compare Supadata's monthly plans with pay-per-call pricing using your real numbers.

Doing it with ScrapeIO

ScrapeIO has transcript endpoints for the YouTube transcript API and TikTok transcript API at 1 credit, the Instagram reel transcript API at 2 credits for reels under 2 minutes, and more for Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Rumble, Twitch and Kick clips. The TikTok and YouTube endpoints read existing captions, so a video with none returns no transcript. Credits never expire. The transcripts guide has examples.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

• https://supadata.ai/pricing
• https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api
• https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
• https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions/download
• https://github.com/openai/whisper
• https://www.assemblyai.com/pricing