ChocoData returns a transcript when you ask for one. VidProxy watches the channel and pushes the transcript the moment a video posts — no polling loop, no video IDs to collect first. Both handle the hard part of getting past YouTube's blocks. The difference is whether you are fetching a list you already have, or watching for things you don't know about yet. Here's where the line falls, pricing included.
A general scraping API covering hundreds of sites, with a YouTube-specific front end at youtubescraperapi.com run by the same company. You call an endpoint, it returns JSON, you're billed on success.
One service that monitors YouTube channels, remembers what it has already sent, and delivers each new video's transcript to your webhook. On-demand lookup included.
If you've been comparing these as two separate options, stop. The footer of youtubescraperapi.com says it plainly: "YouTube Scraper API is an independent third-party tool operated by Chocodata." Both sites publish an identical price ladder — free at 1,000 requests, Vibe at $19 a month, Pro at $49, Custom from $100, and $0.90 per 1,000 on pay-as-you-go — and quote the same 2.6-second median response.
ChocoData is the parent: a general scraping platform its homepage describes as covering 237 sites across 499 endpoints, with an MCP server for agents. YouTube Scraper API is the YouTube-shaped door into it, with nine endpoints and its own transcript route at api.youtubescraperapi.com/api/v1/youtube/transcript. Evaluating one tells you what you need to know about the other.
ChocoData's transcript endpoint is good. Their own description of the response — timestamped segments, the language, whether the captions are auto-generated or human, and the complete text in one field — is exactly what you'd want back, and the last two are details plenty of transcript APIs skip. They advertise a 99.2% success rate and a 2.6-second median. Nothing on this page is going to argue that it's a bad endpoint.
It's also a stateless one. Their site documents no webhook and no monitoring, so "let me know when this channel uploads" isn't a thing you configure — it's a thing you build. There is a channel endpoint, so the pattern is available: run a job on a timer, ask for the channel's videos, keep the last video ID you handled somewhere durable, diff every response against it, then fetch transcripts for whatever survives. Straightforward on a whiteboard. Less so when two runs overlap and the same video goes downstream twice, or when you fetch captions ninety seconds after publish and YouTube hasn't finished generating them, so you cache an empty transcript and never look again.
VidProxy is that job, already written and already debugged. The subscription holds the last-seen video. A delivery row is claimed in the database before the POST leaves, so concurrency can't produce a second copy. A video with no captions yet is held, not discarded, and retried every cycle for up to 24 hours. What arrives at your endpoint is one request per new video with the transcript in it.
Unit economics on bulk fetching. Their Pro plan is $49 a month for 82,000 requests — roughly $0.60 per thousand. If you already hold the video IDs and just need text back in volume, nothing in VidProxy's on-demand quota competes with that, and you should use them. We're not going to dress that up. It is a different line item from monitoring, though: transcripts from a channel you watch are not billed per video here, so the comparison decides archive work and says nothing about keeping up with channels.
Billing on success only is a real quality-of-life feature too: their site states failed requests aren't charged, which is the correct way to price something that has to get past an adversarial host.
Their YouTube surface is also wider than ours. Comments, playlists, search, Shorts and separate caption endpoints — VidProxy returns none of that. And ChocoData proper reaches far beyond YouTube, so if this is one scraping job among many, consolidating on them removes a vendor rather than adding one.
One more, and it's the one that costs us a talking point: residential IPs are not a VidProxy differentiator here. ChocoData's site describes rotating residential and datacenter proxies with a fresh IP per request and retries across pools. We route transcript fetches through a residential IP for exactly the same reason. On this specific problem, both products have solved it, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn't read their site.
Everything that happens because a video appeared rather than because you asked. That's monitoring, deduplication, the retry window, keyword alerts, and the AI enrichment attached to each delivery on Pro and Agency — a summary, key takeaways and topic tags computed once server-side so a downstream model isn't compressing a two-hour transcript every time it reads one.
The MCP server is the other one. Both companies publish an MCP endpoint, but they point at different things: ChocoData's is for agents to reach its scraping targets, while VidProxy's eight tools are scoped to your monitoring account — fetch a transcript, search what you've collected, list your channels, check what's left on your plan, add a channel, pause one, and a destructive removal that stays switched off until you enable it for a specific API key.
| Capability | ChocoData | VidProxy |
|---|---|---|
| Transcript Retrieval | ||
| Transcript by video URL | ✓ Dedicated endpoint | ✓ GET /api/transcript |
| Timestamped segments plus full text | ✓ | ✓ |
| Auto-generated vs human caption flag | ✓ | ✕ |
| Residential-IP fetching | ✓ Fresh IP per request | ✓ Default path |
| AI summary, takeaways, topic tags | ✕ | ✓ Pro / Agency |
| Monitoring & Delivery | ||
| Watch a channel for new uploads | ✕ You poll it | ✓ Core feature |
| Webhook push on a new video | ✕ Not documented | ✓ |
| Server tracks what you've already received | ✕ | ✓ Per subscription |
| Waits for captions that aren't ready yet | ✕ | ✓ Held up to 24h |
| Keyword alerts on transcript text | ✕ | ✓ Pro / Agency |
| Other YouTube Data | ||
| Comments, playlists, search, Shorts | ✓ | ✕ |
| Sites beyond YouTube | ✓ Hundreds, via ChocoData | ✕ |
| MCP server | ✓ Over scraping targets | ✓ 8 tools, your account |
| Pricing & Model | ||
| Free tier without a card | ✓ 1,000 requests | ✓ 1 channel, 10 lookups/mo |
| Pricing model | Per request, billed on success | Flat monthly plan |
| Cost per 1,000 transcripts at volume | ✓ From $0.60 on Pro | Not the model — quota by plan |
| Cost of a channel publishing more often | More requests, higher bill | ✓ Unchanged |
A good transcript endpoint is one component. These are the ones you'd write around it, and they're where poll-based pipelines rot.
A channel endpoint returns the last N uploads every time you ask. Turning that into "what changed" needs stored state and a diff on every run. Here it lives on the subscription and the webhook only fires for something genuinely new.
Overlapping runs send the same video twice, and a duplicate downstream is worse than a late one. Deliveries are claimed in the database before the request goes out, so a race can't produce a second copy.
YouTube often publishes minutes before auto-captions finish generating, and an early fetch returns nothing without saying why. Deliveries are held and retried for up to 24 hours before the video is marked as having none.
Two hours of speech is a lot of tokens to reduce on every read. On Pro and Agency the summary, key takeaways and topic tags are generated once, server-side, and travel with the payload.
ChocoData's ladder, from their own pricing page: Free at $0 for 1,000 requests with 10 concurrent and no card. Vibe at $19 a month for 27,000 requests. Pro at $49 a month for 82,000. Custom from $100 a month for 200,000 up to four million or more. Pay-as-you-go at $0.90 per 1,000 successful requests. Their site states five credits per request, billed on success, with failures not charged.
On raw transcript volume that beats us comfortably. If you need 50,000 transcripts this quarter, use them.
VidProxy charges monthly: Free $0, Starter $9, Pro $29, Agency $79. Channel limits are 1, 15, 100 and 1,000; on-demand lookup quotas are 10, 500, 2,500 and 10,000 a month. The number that doesn't appear in that list is the one that matters for monitoring — videos delivered by a subscription aren't billed per video. A hundred monitored channels on the $29 plan cost $29 whether they publish four videos between them this month or four hundred. Under a per-request model, every one of those four hundred is a line on the bill, plus every empty poll that found nothing.
Both start free with no card. Theirs is 1,000 requests, which is a serious amount of trial — enough to run a real batch and judge the response quality properly. Ours is one monitored channel, one webhook, 10-minute polling and 10 on-demand lookups a month: narrower, but it runs the whole monitoring loop end to end so you can see a transcript land in your own endpoint before deciding anything.
Every ChocoData and YouTube Scraper API figure above was read from chocodata.com and youtubescraperapi.com on 12 August 2026. Success-rate, latency and proxy claims are theirs, quoted from their pages rather than measured by us. Check the live pricing before you commit.
There's no reason to pick only one. ChocoData for the bulk historical pass and any non-transcript YouTube data; VidProxy for the ongoing feed of new uploads on the channels you actually track. The overlap is single-video lookup, and at any real volume their pricing wins that.
Comparing further afield: VidProxy vs Supadata is the closest single-purpose transcript API, vs CreatorCrawl and vs SociaVault cover the multi-platform options, and vs Apify covers assembling it yourself on a marketplace.
Subscribe to a channel and get each new transcript pushed to your webhook. Free tier, no credit card.
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