How to Extract YouTube Transcripts for Your AI App (No API Key Needed)

If you're building an AI app that needs to process video content - RAG pipelines, summarizers, content analyzers - you've probably hit the same wall I did: getting transcripts from YouTube is way harder than it should be. YouTube's official Data API requires OAuth setup, has strict quota limits (10,000 units/day), and doesn't even return transcripts directly. You'd need to chain multiple endpoints together just to get subtitle text. For a simple "give me the transcript" use case, that's overkill. I built a lightweight API that solves this in one request.