Can I vibecode TranscriptAPI?
price $5/moyou'd save $60/yrbuild time one sittingcategory dev-toolsreplaced by 0 people
KINDA
MOATscale infraexecution polish
YouTube video transcripts as JSON with timestamps, search and playlist endpoints.
The Build Prompt
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Build me a small YouTube transcript API service, a personal stand-in for TranscriptAPI. Requirements: - Python 3.11 stack: FastAPI, uvicorn, and the youtube-transcript-api library; no database, one file plus a README is fine. - GET /transcript?video=<id-or-url>: extract the video id, fetch the caption track, return JSON with the full text plus timestamped segments. - Support lang= with a sensible fallback to the first available track, and report which track was actually used in the response. - Clean JSON errors: 404 when captions are disabled or missing, 502 when YouTube blocks the fetch; never a bare 500. - Read an optional comma-separated PROXIES var from .env and rotate per request; with none set, run direct. - GET /health returning version and uptime. - A tiny CLI example in the README: curl the endpoint, jq out the text. - Keep it stateless and private: no accounts, no API keys, no telemetry, no storage. - README must be honest about the failure mode: at any real volume YouTube rate-limits and IP-blocks caption fetches, and this build has no defense. - Out of scope, deliberately: the rotating proxy pool and anti-blocking infrastructure, channel/playlist/search endpoints, bulk throughput, and SLAs. That reliability layer is the thing the paid product actually sells.
What you lose
- ✕staying unblocked when YouTube rate-limits caption fetches
- ✕search, channel and playlist endpoints
- ✕reliability at bulk volume
- ✕an SLA and support when YouTube changes something
Prior art / alternatives
Why it still works
rotating proxy fleet and anti-blocking operations at volume