Pricing
Scority pricing
See the current transcript quota plans and manual onboarding flow.
Open →YouTube API Pricing and Transcript API Costs
Compare YouTube API pricing concepts, quota limits and transcript API cost factors for developers building AI and automation workflows.
Direct answer
YouTube API pricing depends on which API you mean
The official YouTube APIs, hosted transcript APIs and internal scraping or caption-fetching systems have different cost models. For transcript workflows, the practical cost questions are request volume, caption availability, fresh fetches, cache hits, retries and support needs.
- Use official Google pricing and quota docs for official YouTube API costs.
- Use transcript API pricing pages for hosted transcript extraction costs.
- Do not compare exact vendor prices without checking current public sources and dates.
Official API
Is the official YouTube API free?
The official YouTube APIs use Google's current quota and billing model. Check Google's current documentation before publishing exact free limits, costs or quota units.
- Official API pricing is separate from Scority pricing.
- A Google API key does not automatically provide normalized transcript text.
- For official metadata, search or channel workflows, use the official API.
Quota
Why quota matters
Transcript apps often fail operationally before they fail financially. A useful pricing plan needs enough monthly quota, predictable burst behavior and clear errors when limits are reached.
- quota_exceeded means the monthly product quota is exhausted.
- rate_limited means the request burst exceeded the short-window protection.
- Both can affect user experience if the integration does not handle them.
Cost drivers
What drives transcript API cost
Transcript API cost is not only about a request count. It also depends on how often the API has to fetch fresh upstream captions and how much repeated traffic can be served from cache.
- Fresh fetches are more expensive operationally than repeat cached requests.
- Language-specific requests can create separate cache buckets.
- Retries after upstream failures can increase request pressure.
- Bulk jobs should be queued instead of sent as a burst.
Cache concept
Fresh fetch vs cached transcript
A fresh fetch means Scority has to retrieve and parse transcript data from an upstream caption path. A cached transcript can be returned without repeating that upstream work.
- The API response shape stays the same for callers.
- Cache behavior should not be treated as a promise that every request is cheap or instant.
- Use stable video IDs and language parameters so repeated requests can reuse the correct cache bucket.
Planning
How to estimate transcript API usage
Start with the user action that triggers transcript fetching, then estimate the number of distinct videos, repeated views, languages and retry behavior.
- Count distinct videos per month.
- Count repeated transcript reads per video.
- Count requested languages separately.
- Include background jobs and agent workflows, not just direct user clicks.
- Plan for unavailable captions and upstream failure handling.
Scority
Scority plans are quota-based
Scority public plans start at $9/month for 2,000 transcripts and scale through Builder, Pro and Scale tiers before custom Enterprise. Stripe checkout is not live, so access is still issued through manual onboarding.
- Starter: $9/month, 2,000 transcripts, 10 rpm.
- Builder: $19/month, 10,000 transcripts, 30 rpm.
- Pro: $49/month, 50,000 transcripts, 60 rpm.
- Scale: $149/month, 250,000 transcripts, 120 rpm.
Fit
What not to pay for if you only need transcripts
If your product only needs transcript text and timestamped segments, do not choose a broader tool just because it has many unrelated YouTube features.
- Player/embed controls are not transcript extraction.
- Upload, ads, analytics, playlist and comments APIs are separate intents.
- Media retrieval or format conversion is not part of Scority's product.