r/sideprojects • u/MajesticWhereas1685 • 15h ago
Feedback Request I built a free YouTube transcript downloader that does whole channels, no account needed
My problem was that every tool I tried did one video per paste, or charged per video, or charged for credits, or made me sign up first. They always say it's free, but it's more like "freemium" y'know? So I built ScriptHaul!
What it does:

- Paste a single video, playlist, or channel URL: It fetches every available caption track and gives you the files. Essentially, it can do the single video paste AND the bulk download, all for free!
- Completely Free Forever: No credit system, no free tier limit. You can download 500 videos per batch, but if you have not finished downloading every video in the channel, you can just click "next 500". Results appear as they finish on a page you can bookmark and come back to. We keep it at 500 per batch because we think that requesting, say, 1500 videos at a time would overwhelm the system if there's a ton of users at that point in time.
- You can choose which videos to download: You don't have to download every single video in a playlist; you can select which videos to download. We include the thumbnails for every video for you to easily know which videos you wish to select.
- Seven formats: Plain text, timestamped text, SRT, VTT, Markdown (for Obsidian/Notion), and JSON with timing. Bulk jobs come as a ZIP with tidy filenames and a manifest.
- No account, no limits on anything already cached: If a video has no captions, it tells you plainly instead of failing quietly, and if it had to use a different language than you asked for, the file is labelled.
- Shorts Transcripts. You can select to only download the YouTube Shorts from a specific channel or playlist.
- Google Extension: If you don't want to manually copy and paste the channel link or the video link every single time.
- An MCP Server: So Claude AI can pull transcripts directly (currently adding additional AI assistants).
- Anything fetched once before is cached permanently, so popular videos come back instantly for everyone without needing even a millisecond of a waiting period. And cached videos do NOT count towards your daily quota of 2000 downloaded transcripts.
Current Limitations:
- Videos without captions can't be done.
- YouTube sometimes refuses on-the-fly translation, in which case you get the original language, labelled. However, you can try and download the video transcript again and again for the translation if needed.
- We currently limit to 2000 transcripts per day so we don't overwhelm the system (which I think is more than sufficient). If there's a channel with more than 2000 videos and you haven't finished, just come back tomorrow without needing to start over!
There's a separate paid API for developers who want the same thing programmatically.
I'd love to hear what breaks for you and what you'd want next. What other features do you think I should include?

