Introducing ScriptBase

Every team that works with video eventually hits the same wall: getting the words out of the video. Maybe you're building search over a podcast back catalog, generating subtitles for short-form clips, feeding transcripts into an LLM, or repurposing long videos into highlights. The moment you start, you discover the real work isn't your feature — it's the extraction layer underneath it.

That layer is miserable to build and worse to maintain. So we built ScriptBase to make it disappear.

What is ScriptBase?

ScriptBase is a developer API that extracts transcripts, metadata, and video data from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Vimeo, and most public video hosts — all through a single endpoint.

You send a video URL. You get back a clean, structured transcript with word-level timestamps. No per-platform scrapers, no rate-limit roulette, no speech-to-text infrastructure to provision and babysit.

curl "https://scriptbase.app/api/v1/transcribe?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "platform": "youtube",
    "language": "en",
    "duration_sec": 213,
    "segments": [
      { "start": 0.0, "end": 0.48, "text": "We're" },
      { "start": 0.48, "end": 0.72, "text": "no" },
      { "start": 0.72, "end": 1.10, "text": "strangers" }
    ],
    "full_text": "We're no strangers to love..."
  },
  "meta": { "format": "json", "credits_used": 1, "credits_remaining": 24 }
}

That's the whole integration. One request, one predictable response shape, every platform.

Why we built it

Extracting video transcripts looks like a solved problem until you ship it to production. Then reality sets in:

• Every platform is a moving target. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram each have their own structure, their own quirks, and their own habit of changing things the week your code goes live. A scraper that works today breaks silently next month.
• Captions aren't always there. Sometimes the platform has native captions — great, they're free and accurate. Often it doesn't, and now you need a speech-to-text model, a GPU bill, and an audio pipeline.
• Rate limits and blocks fight back. Pull at any real volume and you're suddenly in an arms race you didn't sign up for.
• It's never your actual product. Every hour spent on the extraction layer is an hour not spent on the thing your users came for.

ScriptBase absorbs all of that. We maintain the per-platform logic, run the speech models, and handle the messy edges, so your code stays a single HTTP call.

What you get

• Sub-second extraction. Get a full transcript back in well under a second.
• Word-level timestamps. Every word carries its own start and end time — exactly what you need for search, captioning, editing, and highlight clips.
• 100+ languages. High-accuracy transcripts across every supported language — expect 95%+ word accuracy on clean audio.
• Multiple output formats. Request json, plain text, srt, or vtt — pick what your pipeline needs without post-processing.
• One endpoint, every platform. The same call works across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Vimeo. No per-platform integrations to write or maintain.
• Zero data retention. We don't store or train on your content. Zero-retention mode is available on every plan and is the default on Pro and above.

Built for production, not demos

A few things we obsessed over so you don't have to:

• Predictable pricing. Each accepted request costs exactly 1 credit. No surprise multipliers, no metered seconds to reason about.
• Honest failures. If a job genuinely can't complete, your credit is refunded automatically and you get a clear error, not a silent timeout.
• Clean responses. The API returns only what you need — platform, language, duration, segments, and full text.

Getting started

Sign up for a free account and get 25 free credits — no credit card required. That's enough to build and test a real prototype before lunch.

1. Create an account and grab your API key.
2. Make your first request:

curl "https://scriptbase.app/api/v1/transcribe?url=YOUR_VIDEO_URL" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

3. Need subtitles instead of JSON? Add a format parameter:

curl "https://scriptbase.app/api/v1/transcribe?url=YOUR_VIDEO_URL&format=srt" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

That's it. From here, the documentation has the full API reference, format guides, and language options.

What's next

This is just the start. We're expanding platform coverage, adding richer metadata, and publishing more guides on this blog — from framework-specific integrations to real-world use cases like search, subtitling, and content repurposing.

If video transcripts have ever stood between you and the feature you actually wanted to build, give ScriptBase a try. We think you'll get your afternoon back.