Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern access to the YTAPI websites, dashboard, documentation, and API at ytapi.dev, web.ytapi.dev, api.ytapi.dev, and docs.ytapi.dev (together, the “Service”).

The Service is operated by the person or company that runs those hostnames and charges you through the Stripe account named on your YTAPI receipt (“YTAPI”, “we”). Notices under these Terms go to [email protected]. The registered legal name and postal address of that operator, once published, will be added to this page and will identify the contracting party. Until then, the contracting party is the operator of those hostnames.

1. Acceptance

Creating an account, generating an API key, buying credits, or sending a request to the API is acceptance of these Terms. You confirm that you are legally able to enter this agreement and, if you use the Service for an organization, that you can bind that organization. The organization and the person who accepts are both responsible for use of the Service under that account.

2. The Service

YTAPI is a developer API for transcripts and related public metadata of YouTube videos, channels, playlists, and search results. It is an independent service. It is not YouTube, not Google, and not endorsed by either of them.

Responses are produced from publicly available YouTube pages and player data, sent through our own infrastructure. We do not provide a general-purpose proxy, and a customer API key cannot be used to reach arbitrary URLs.

We may change, suspend, or withdraw an endpoint, a response field, or the Service. When a change breaks a documented request, we will describe it in the documentation or the changelog. There is no uptime commitment unless we have signed a separate written reservation with you.

The public demo on the marketing site is rate-limited and is not the paid API.

3. Accounts and credentials

You need an account to create API keys and to use the dashboard playground. Signup is by a one-time code sent to your email, or by Google or GitHub. An AI agent you use can also start a signup for you; the account and its key are created only after the code we email you is entered. You are responsible for the keys issued on your account. A key is shown in full once. Store it as a secret. Requests made with your key, including requests made by a person you shared it with, are yours.

You may revoke a key in the dashboard. Revocation takes effect as soon as the API observes it, which can take up to a minute.

We may refuse, suspend, or close an account or key that breaks these Terms, that we reasonably believe is fraudulent, or that puts the Service, YouTube, or our hosting providers at risk.

4. Credits

Credits are a digital balance used to pay for successful billed API responses. New credits are added only as the packs listed on the pricing page. We do not sell custom amounts, and we do not start new monthly subscriptions. A subscription that already exists continues until you cancel it in the Stripe billing portal.

Signup includes 200 credits, once per email address. An address that already received them, including through a deleted account or another spelling of the same mailbox (such as a +tag), does not receive them again, and we may limit how many new accounts on one email domain receive them each day, or pause signup credits for a day when signups look automated. You do not add a card to receive them. Purchased credits and unused signup credits do not expire. They are a balance we still owe you if the Service stops, not a promise that a particular YouTube video will remain available.

A successful response on a billed endpoint costs the number of credits stated on the credits page in the documentation at the time of the call. Today, that schedule is:

• one credit for a successful transcript, full video record, search, channel, or playlist response, including a response served from cache;
• zero credits for a successful basic video lookup and for search suggestions;
• one credit for each successful task in a batch job, including a basic video lookup submitted inside a batch. Submitting a job and reading its status cost zero credits. A failed task costs zero.

Failed responses, including client errors, missing captions, rate limits, and upstream errors, cost zero credits. A request you retry after a success is a new request and is billed again if it succeeds.

Customer Cache-Control: no-cache and no-store headers do not bypass the cache. Cache policy is ours.

The dashboard playground debits the same schedule from the signed-in account. The public demo does not debit an account.

5. Price and rate limits

Packs, prices, and per-key limits are the ones published on the pricing page:

A key on an account that has not bought a pack can make 1 request per second and 100 requests per UTC day. Buying any pack removes the daily limit. We may still slow or suspend a free or paid key that threatens the Service or the upstream platforms, or that is used for card testing, credential attacks, or resale as a YouTube front-end.

A paid pack raises the keys on that account to the limit for the highest pack purchased. The limit is a cap on that key. It is not a promise that every customer can run at that cap at the same time. A limit above 3,000 requests per minute, or a reserved share of capacity, requires a separate written agreement. Ask at [email protected].

Prices are in US dollars and do not include taxes we are required to collect. We do not turn on automatic tax collection until a tax registration is in place.

6. Payment, refunds, and disputes

Packs are sold as one-time payments through Stripe. Credits are added after Stripe tells us the payment succeeded, not when the browser reaches the success page. The same Checkout Session is credited once.

Credits are supplied immediately. You agree to that immediate supply when you pay.

You may ask for a refund within 14 days of a pack purchase if none of the credits from that pack have been used. Write to [email protected]. We may deduct the card-processing fee Stripe does not return to us. Using one credit from a pack is performance of that digital supply, and the unused remainder of that pack is not refundable under this 14-day request.

If a charge is refunded in whole or in part, we remove credits still in your balance in proportion to the refunded fraction of that charge. We do not take credits from a later pack to collect a shortfall, and we do not restore credits you already spent. A partial refund does not remove the paid rate limit. A full refund does.

If a payment is disputed, we remove the same proportion of credits still in the balance. If the dispute is decided in your favor and we had removed credits, we put those removed credits back, less any portion a separate refund still justifies. If the dispute is lost after credits were consumed, we may suspend the keys on the account.

7. Your content and YouTube’s content

You keep whatever rights you already have in requests you send us. You give us a limited right to process those requests, cache responses, and store batch results so we can run the Service, prevent abuse, and debug failures.

Transcripts, titles, and other YouTube material remain subject to the rights of their owners and to YouTube’s terms. We do not assign those rights to you. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to collect, store, and display what you request, including personal data that appears in a public video or transcript.

Do not present the Service, or data from it, as an official YouTube product.

8. Acceptable use

You will not:

• break the law, or help someone else break it;
• use the Service to harass, dox, or harm a person;
• send card-testing, credential-stuffing, or other attack traffic;
• bypass a security control, probe the Service as an open proxy, or overload it in a way that is not a good-faith measurement with your own key and credits;
• resell or white-label the Service without our written permission;
• share an API key publicly.

We may suspend access while we investigate a breach of this section.

9. Availability and third parties

The Service depends on YouTube and on Cloudflare, and on the network between them and us. Those parties can change their systems, block traffic, or remove a video. We will use reasonable efforts to keep the API working. We are not liable for a failure or a change caused by YouTube, Cloudflare, Stripe, a network provider, a denial of service, a legal order, or any other cause we do not control.

Cached copies of successful responses may be stored for up to 30 days so a later request can be answered quickly. Batch results stay in your account until you delete the account or ask us to delete them.

10. Intellectual property

The API, dashboard, documentation, and the software that runs them are ours or our licensors’. These Terms give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to call the API and to use the dashboard for your own applications. They do not give you ownership of the Service.

11. Disclaimer

The Service and the data it returns are provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not warrant that a transcript is complete, that a video will remain available, that a response is fit for a particular purpose, or that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free. Mandatory rights you have as a consumer are not affected.

12. Liability

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Where a cap is allowed, our total liability arising out of the Service in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us for the Service in that period. If you have only used free credits, that cap is zero to the extent a zero cap is enforceable, and otherwise it is the minimum the law requires.

We are not liable for lost profits, lost goodwill, lost data, or indirect or consequential loss, or for the cost of a substitute service, whether we knew the loss was possible.

13. Indemnity

If you use the Service for a business, you will indemnify us and our contractors against claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of the data, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of someone else’s rights. We will tell you about the claim and let you control the defense, provided the settlement does not admit fault on our behalf without your agreement and ours.

14. Privacy

We process account, billing, and API data as described in the Privacy Policy. If you use the API to obtain content that includes personal data, you are responsible for your own legal basis. Business customers who need a data processing agreement can request one at [email protected].

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms by posting a new version on this page with a new date. If a change materially reduces your rights, we will also send a notice to the email on the account or post it in the dashboard before it applies. Continuing to use the Service after the effective date is acceptance of the new Terms. If you do not agree, stop using the Service and write to us about any unused credits.

16. Governing law

If you are a consumer in the EEA or the United Kingdom, you keep the mandatory rights of your country of residence, including any cooling-off rule that still applies after you agree to immediate supply of digital credits.

For every other dispute, the law of the country where the operator has its registered seat or habitual residence applies, without conflict-of-law rules that would select another country’s law. The courts of that place are the venue, except where a consumer statute lets you sue where you live.

17. General

These Terms are the whole agreement about the Service, except for a written capacity reservation or a data processing agreement we sign with you. If a court holds one provision unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Waiting to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them to a successor of the Service.

Version 2.1 · 7 October 2026