Free YouTube transcript · No signup · No daily limit
YouTube transcript, in seconds.
Paste a YouTube URL. Get the full transcript as plain text, timestamped, or SRT subtitles. Copy or download.
Uses YouTube's own auto-captions — same words you'd see in the in-player transcript, but properly cleaned and actually copyable. Free because the architecture costs us almost nothing.
Often used together
All free, browser-only, no signup required.
Turn a quote into a poster
Spot a great line in the transcript? Drop it into the post designer with a background image and brand colours.
📄Export as a PDF
Print the transcript, share it as a single document, or archive it. Paste the text into a PDF and you're done.
🔍Upscale a video thumbnail
Grabbing a YouTube thumbnail at the same time? Bump its resolution with the AI upscaler before re-using.
What this is good for
Study notes from a long lecture. Pulling quotes out of a podcast episode. Turning your own YouTube video into a blog post. Captioning for accessibility. Researching what a competitor actually said, without having to sit through 40 minutes of video. The job is common, the tools that do it well are usually paywalled, and YouTube itself has steadily made the in-page transcript harder to copy from.
This tool exists because the data is already there — YouTube auto-captions almost every public video — and fetching it cleanly in a useful format genuinely takes a few seconds. The “freemium” competitors charge for cleanup the API essentially does for free.
Three formats, three jobs
- Plain text — paragraphs broken on long pauses, no timestamps. Best for reading, summarising, or pasting into a document or Claude / ChatGPT for processing.
- Timestamped — each segment prefixed with
[m:ss]. Best for quoting, jumping back to a specific moment, or cross-referencing the video. - SRT — standard subtitle file format with hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds. Best for re-embedding the captions in your own video, importing into Premiere / DaVinci / Final Cut, or uploading to another platform.
Why we're not running speech-to-text
We could. Whisper and the other open-weights models would let us transcribe any audio file, not just videos with existing captions. But that costs us real money per video — and to stay genuinely free for you, we'd have to add either a signup wall, a daily cap, ads inside the output, or a watermark. None of those are us.
For YouTube specifically, the captions already exist. Fetching them costs us nothing. So the tool stays free. If we add audio / video upload (where there are no existing captions), that'll either be a paid feature or come with explicit limits — we'll say so up front.
What else is here
Poster Poster is a calendar-driven social media scheduler for working musicians and small businesses — connect your calendar once, your accounts once, your design once, and the posts just go out. The tool above is a free utility; the full app is the bigger thing we're building. There's also a free post designer, an image upscaler, a resizer, a compressor, and a file-to-PDF converter — all the same browser-only, no-signup model.