YouTube Transcripts on Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Workers

Next.js route handler

Put the key in the project's environment variables (TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY) and proxy requests through a route handler. The TranscriptYT API does the YouTube side, so nothing on Vercel talks to YouTube.

// app/api/transcript/route.ts
export async function GET(request: Request) {
  const url = new URL(request.url).searchParams.get("url");
  if (!url) return Response.json({ error: "url is required" }, { status: 400 });
  const res = await fetch(
    `https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?url=${encodeURIComponent(url)}`,
    { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY}` } },
  );
  return Response.json(await res.json(), { status: res.status });
}

Cloudflare Worker

export default {
  async fetch(request, env) {
    const url = new URL(request.url).searchParams.get("url");
    return fetch(
      `https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?url=${encodeURIComponent(url)}&format=text`,
      { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${env.TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY}` } },
    );
  },
};

Timeouts and long videos

Captioned videos return in a second or two. A video with no captions is transcribed with AI, which takes about a minute or two for an hour of audio, so raise the function's max duration (maxDuration in Next.js) or pass mode=captions to fail fast instead of transcribing.

Building an AI feature?

Ask for format=text or format=md to send the transcript straight to a model, or call /v1/summary for a ready-made summary. For agents, the MCP server gives the model the transcript as a tool.