Supadata is a solid on-demand YouTube transcript API — you pass a video ID, it returns the text. VidProxy does that too, but it's built around a different job: it watches any YouTube channel and pushes the full transcript, plus an AI summary, to your webhook the moment a new video goes live. If you've been polling Supadata on a schedule to catch fresh uploads, here's the honest breakdown of both so you can pick the right one for what you're building.
A REST API for fetching YouTube transcripts on demand. You pass a video ID or URL, it returns the transcript. No channel subscriptions, no monitoring, no push delivery — stateless lookup is the entire product.
A monitoring platform that watches YouTube channels and automatically delivers transcripts when new videos publish — with on-demand lookup included for one-off needs.
Supadata is stateless: you ask, it responds. You send a video ID, it returns the transcript. That transaction is the entire product. Supadata doesn't know which channels you care about, doesn't detect when new videos publish, and has no concept of delivering anything to you unprompted. That's not a criticism — stateless lookup is useful for tools where a user explicitly requests a transcript.
VidProxy is stateful: you subscribe to channels, and VidProxy monitors them. When a new video publishes, VidProxy detects it, fetches the transcript, and pushes the payload to your webhook — without you asking. If you're building anything that needs to react to new videos from specific channels, you need monitoring infrastructure. Supadata doesn't provide that.
Supadata is well-suited for tools where the user triggers the lookup — a browser extension that transcribes the video currently open, a note-taking app where a user pastes a YouTube URL, a one-off analysis script where you already have a list of specific video IDs. If the flow is "user provides video, tool returns transcript," Supadata is clean and direct.
Per-request pricing can also be advantageous at certain usage patterns — if you need transcripts for a very large number of one-off videos where you already know the IDs, per-request economics may be cheaper than a flat monthly subscription.
VidProxy is the right choice whenever you need to react to new videos without human initiation. Competitor monitoring pipelines, AI knowledge bases that need fresh content from specific channels, financial research that collects earnings calls quarter after quarter, newsletter automation that summarizes new expert content — all of these require monitoring infrastructure that Supadata doesn't provide.
VidProxy is also the right choice if you need AI enrichment (summaries, key takeaways) or keyword filtering — neither of which Supadata offers. And flat monthly pricing means your cost is predictable regardless of how many videos publish on the channels you monitor.
If you're already using VidProxy for channel monitoring and occasionally need to fetch a transcript for a specific video outside your subscriptions, VidProxy's GET /api/transcript?url= endpoint handles that. Pass any YouTube URL or video ID, get back the transcript with timestamps. Credit limits by plan: 10/mo on Free, 500 on Starter, 2,500 on Pro, 10,000 on Agency.
This means if you're building a pipeline that's primarily channel-based but occasionally needs one-off lookups, you don't need a separate Supadata account. But if on-demand lookup is your entire use case with no monitoring needs, a dedicated service may offer better pricing at volume.
| Capability | Supadata | VidProxy |
|---|---|---|
| Transcript Retrieval | ||
| On-demand transcript by video ID | ✓ Core feature | ✓ Included on paid plans |
| On-demand transcript by YouTube URL | ✓ | ✓ |
| Timestamped caption segments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-language transcript support | ✓ Some languages | ✓ Where available on YouTube |
| AI summary + key takeaways | ✕ | ✓ Pro / Agency |
| Channel Monitoring | ||
| Watch channels for new videos automatically | ✕ You build this | ✓ Core feature |
| Webhook push when a new video publishes | ✕ | ✓ |
| Webhook payload includes full transcript | ✕ | ✓ |
| Hold & retry until transcript is ready | ✕ You build this | ✓ Up to 24h automatic |
| Pull API — query stored transcripts by time window | ✕ | ✓ |
| Keyword alerts — fire only on matching transcripts | ✕ | ✓ Pro / Agency |
| Pricing & Model | ||
| Free tier | ✓ Limited credits | ✓ 1 channel, 10 on-demand lookups/mo |
| Pricing model | Per-request or credit bundles | Flat monthly subscription |
| Predictable cost at scale | Grows with request volume | ✓ Fixed monthly rate |
If you landed here searching for the Supadata YouTube transcript API free tier, here's the honest version. Supadata's free tier is a monthly allotment of on-demand transcript calls — enough to test single-video fetches and prototype before you hit a paywall. It's a per-request model, so the free tier is measured in requests.
VidProxy's free tier is shaped around monitoring, not just fetching. You get 1 monitored channel, 1 webhook, 10-minute polling, 30-day log history, the pull API at 60 requests/minute, and 10 on-demand transcript lookups per month. That's enough to stand up a complete end-to-end pipeline — watch a channel, receive a real webhook with a real transcript in the payload — before you spend a cent.
Both free tiers are genuinely free — no credit card, no trial clock. The difference is what you're testing: a fetch call versus a live monitoring loop. And neither one makes you set up a Google Cloud project or manage the YouTube Data API quota.
Supadata scales by usage — you pay more as your request volume climbs, which is predictable when your usage is bursty or one-off. VidProxy scales by flat plan: Starter ($9), Pro ($29), Agency ($79), each bundling more channels, faster polling (down to 2 minutes on Pro), unlimited webhooks, and a bigger monthly lookup quota (500 / 2,500 / 10,000). For continuous monitoring, a flat plan keeps the bill flat no matter how many videos those channels publish.
Supadata doesn't try to monitor channels. VidProxy doesn't try to be the cheapest per-request lookup. The products have different shapes. Supadata is a lookup API — shallow, fast, stateless. VidProxy is a monitoring platform — stateful, push-based, with more infrastructure built in.
The meaningful overlap is in one-off transcript fetching. If you're already on VidProxy for monitoring and occasionally need to look up a video outside your subscriptions, the built-in GET /api/transcript endpoint covers it. But if your entire use case is high-volume on-demand lookup with no monitoring requirements, compare per-request pricing before committing.
GET /api/transcript), but its core is real-time channel monitoring: it watches any YouTube channel and pushes the full transcript, plus an optional AI summary, to your webhook the moment a new video is published. If you were polling Supadata on a schedule to catch new uploads, VidProxy replaces that with a push.
youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml) and extracts captions directly, so there's no Google Cloud project, no OAuth, and no YouTube Data API quota. You sign up, add a channel, and point it at a webhook.
GET /api/transcript?url=... (or ?video_id=...) returns the full transcript for any public YouTube video without setting up a subscription. It's the same one-call model Supadata offers, and it lives alongside VidProxy's channel-monitoring feature.
Subscribe to channels, get transcripts delivered automatically. Free tier, no credit card.
No credit card · Free tier forever