Privacy Policy

Effective August 9, 2026

Using the site without an account

Reading transcripts, searching inside them, the free daily AI summary and every subtitle converter work without an account. We do not ask for your name or your email to use them.

To apply the free limits — 3 YouTube transcripts a day, 10 a week, one AI summary a day, and 3 TikTok or Instagram transcripts in total rather than per day — we have to recognise the same visitor twice. We do that without a login: your IP address and browser user-agent are hashed together with a random identifier stored in a cookie called tt_uid, and only that hash is kept. It is a counter key, not a profile: it is not linked to a name, an email or an advertising identity, and the counters expire on their own (two days for the daily ones, about two weeks for the weekly one, and a year for the short-form one, because that allowance does not renew with the day).

Accounts, and only for paid plans

An account exists only if you subscribe. It holds your email address, your plan, your credit balance and renewal date, your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, and your interface language. Sign-in is by a single-use link sent to that email address; the link expires after 15 minutes and we store it until it is used or expires.

We never store a password, and we never see your card. Card details go directly to Stripe, which processes the payment and tells us only that a subscription started, renewed or ended.

What we log when you run something

Every action that costs credits, and every free action that counts against a limit, writes one row: which action it was (transcript, summary, question, moment search, a video in a batch, a question across a batch), the YouTube video ID, how many credits it cost, and when. For a subscriber the row is attached to the account, so the history page can show it. For an anonymous visitor it is attached to the anonymous hash described above. It contains no request text: the questions you ask about a video and the words you search for are not written down here or anywhere else, by us or on our behalf. The one thing we do keep the text of is the summary itself, and only for an account — see below.

Summaries we keep for you

If you are signed in, an AI summary you generate is saved to your account. The row holds the YouTube video ID, the video title, the language you asked the summary to be written in, the summary text itself, and when it was written. It exists so that My videos on your account page can hand you back something you have already paid for instead of charging you to produce it twice.

Asking for the same video again in the same language overwrites that row rather than adding a second copy. Asking in a different language is a different summary and is kept separately. We hold them until you delete them: any single summary can be deleted from your account page, and all of them go when the account does.

This applies to accounts only. If you are not signed in, your summary is generated, sent to your browser and never written down — the anonymous identifier described above is a counter key, not a filing cabinet.

The transcript cache

Caption tracks we fetch from YouTube are cached on our side, keyed by the YouTube video ID, together with the video title and duration. The cache exists so that asking a second question about a video does not fetch it again, and so that a video someone already looked up is instant for the next person. It holds public YouTube caption text and nothing about who requested it.

A TikTok or an Instagram reel has no caption track to fetch, so we transcribe it instead. We ask Apify for the video's title, its duration and a direct link to the file; our server then downloads the file from TikTok's or Instagram's own CDN and posts it to Deepgram, which returns the text of what is said in it. What Deepgram receives is the whole video file, picture and sound, because it takes the container as it comes rather than an audio track we strip out first. That file exists only in memory, for the length of that one request: it is never written to disk, and the download link is never handed to your browser. The only thing kept is the resulting text, in the same cache as the YouTube captions above.

Batches

When you run a batch of links, we keep a list of which videos were in it so that you can ask questions across the whole batch afterwards. One row per video: your account, an identifier for the batch derived from the list of links itself, the YouTube video ID, the video title and its duration. The caption text is not copied here — it stays in the transcript cache described above and is read back from there.

These rows are deleted 24 hours after the batch is run. Deletion is not a promise we keep by hand: every row carries its own expiry, expired rows are never returned even before they are removed, and the sweep runs whenever any batch is written. Nothing about a batch survives it — after that, the same list of links is simply a new batch.

Converters run locally

The subtitle converters (SRT, VTT, TXT) run entirely in your browser. Files you convert are never transmitted to us or anyone else. The transcript search on the result page is the same: it runs on text already in your browser and sends nothing back.

Analytics

We measure anonymous usage events — a transcript being fetched, a summary finishing, a paywall being shown, a checkout being started — to understand which tools are useful. An event carries the page, the action, the YouTube video ID where there is one, and the technical details a request carries anyway: browser, operating system, device type and IP address, from which an approximate location is derived. It never carries your name or your email address. We do not use advertising trackers and we do not sell data.

This runs on PostHog, on their European hosting, and it is reached through this domain rather than theirs. Nothing is written to your device for it: the identifier that ties one page's events together is made fresh on every page load and kept in memory only, so it is gone when you leave.

PostHog also records sessions — a replay of how the page behaved, rebuilt from the changes made to it. Anything typed into any field is masked before it leaves your browser, and so is the email address printed on the account, sign-in and post-purchase pages. A recording is of the page, not of you, and it is held in the European Union like everything else here.

Processors we use

The Telegram bot

Our Telegram bot is a separate, optional product. If you open it, Telegram provides it with your Telegram user ID and username, and it stores your language preference, credit balance and processing history to operate. That data lives with the bot and is covered by the notices shown inside it.

Deleting your data

Write to [email protected] from the address on the account and we will delete the account, its saved summaries, its usage rows and its sign-in tokens. You do not have to write to us to remove a single summary — there is a delete button on each one in My videos. Cancelling a subscription is separate and is done in Stripe from the account page. Anonymous counters cannot be deleted on request because they are not identifiable; clearing the tt_uid cookie ends their association with your browser, and they expire by themselves anyway.

Contact

Questions about this policy: [email protected].

Transcriptube is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. Transcripts remain the property of their respective video creators.