Send a YouTube URL, get back a ready-to-use MP4 or MP3 link.
Paste a YouTube link, pick a format, and hit download.
$ yt-dlp "https://youtube.com/watch?v=..."
[youtube] Extracting URL...
[youtube] Downloading webpage
[youtube] Downloading player API JSON
ERROR: [youtube] Sign in to confirm
you're not a bot. Use --cookies-from-
browser or --cookies for the auth...POST /api/v2/download
{ "url": "https://youtu.be/...", "format": "1080" }
// then poll the job...
{
"status": "COMPLETED",
"title": "...",
"fileSize": 32240544,
"downloadUrl": "https://cdn..."
}Vid Kraken is a YouTube download API for SaaS products and AI teams. We handle bot detection, proxies, and retries, so your pipeline never hits “confirm you’re not a bot” errors.
You’ve tried the RapidAPI listings. Oxylabs. DIY yt-dlp setups. They all fail the same way when YouTube tightens its bot detection — and your customers notice first.
$ cat youtube-downloads.postmortem
Jan RapidAPI provider #1 — great demo, dead in 3 weeks
Feb provider #2 — 429s all week, support went silent
Mar provider #3 — "Video unavailable" on half the catalog
Apr DIY: Oxylabs + yt-dlp — cookies rotted in prod within days
May customer email: "downloads are broken AGAIN??"I didn’t want to build this. I hit the same wall — tried every provider on RapidAPI, Oxylabs, and dozens of other services, and watched them all fail on my own customers. The reliability out there was so poor I had to take matters into my own hands and build something that’s actually reliable. For real.
— Prav, founder
Staying ahead of YouTube’s bot detection is the hard part — and it’s exactly what we’ve built. Every request goes through, with zero cookie or proxy work on your end. Counted per video, live below — see how that compares in YouTube download APIs compared.
Every request clears YouTube’s bot checks behind the scenes — so you never see a “confirm you’re not a bot” 403.
Videos that fail in yt-dlp and other tools still come through here. If one path is blocked, we find another — automatically.
No cookies to export, no proxies to rent, no engine to update. We keep it working as YouTube changes.
Transient hiccups are retried automatically behind the scenes, before they ever reach your application.
Trusted by 20+ SaaS companies
SaaS and AI teams that import YouTube into their product — and got tired of maintaining their own download pipelines.
“We tried every YouTube tool on Apify, RapidAPI, and a dozen other platforms — none of them worked reliably. This is the first one we could actually trust in production, so we stopped fighting downloads and got back to building our own product.”
— Engineering lead, video-AI startup
“Before this we rolled our own pipeline on Oxylabs and other proxy services — expensive, and still not reliable. We switched and never looked back. The reliability was fantastic for the price.”
— Founder, media automation tool
“Our users love that YouTube import is back and just works. Turning it back on gave our own conversion a real lift — and we haven’t had to touch it since.”
— CTO, AI content platform
Quotes are paraphrased and anonymized at our customers’ request — we work with a small number of teams and keep their names private.
MP4 video from 360p to 4K, or just the audio as MP3, AAC or the original stream.
MP4 up to 4K (H.264 by default), plus audio as a real 320 kbps MP3, AAC (M4A) or the original stream.
Finished files come back as a plain HTTPS link. Stream it, save it, or hand it to your users — no extra proxying.
Get the video title and duration the moment you submit, before the download even finishes.
Pick a specific audio track for dubbed videos, with sensible fallback when it isn’t available.
Pass a start and end time to download just the segment you need instead of the whole video.
A simple REST API and async job queue that grows from your first request to high-volume production traffic.
POST a YouTube URL to /api/v2/download, poll the job, and get a direct HTTPS file URL. A plain REST API — no SDK required.
POST a YouTube URL. Get back the video title, duration, and a job ID instantly.
Poll the job endpoint. When it’s done, you get a direct download URL.
Stream it or save it — it’s just a file URL.
Your App
POST /api/v2/download
Poll Status
GET /api/v2/download/{jobId}
Download
Download link
curl -X POST https://vidkraken.com/api/v2/download \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url":"https://youtu.be/...","format":"1080"}'
# → { "jobId": "...", "title": "...",
# "duration": 213, "status": "IN_QUEUE" }curl https://vidkraken.com/api/v2/download/JOB_ID \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
# → { "status": "COMPLETED",
# "downloadUrl": "https://proxy.vidkraken.com/...",
# "fileSize": 32240544 }You pay for bandwidth only — no per-download fees. Failed downloads, polling and metadata lookups are free.
For small projects & indie devs
($0.25 per GB)
400 GB / month
Additional usage
Best value for production
($0.20 per GB)
2 TB / month
Additional usage
For platforms at volume
($0.15 per GB)
10 TB / month
Additional usage
Committed bandwidth volume at negotiated rates — custom formats and a dedicated support channel.
Questions? Email us at [email protected]
Just exploring? Start free — no credit card required
Send a URL, get your file. We keep it working — you don’t have to.
No cookies. No proxies. No maintenance.
Start free — no credit cardFree to start • No credit card required
Everything you need to know before you ship.
yt-dlp and most Apify Actors break the moment YouTube tightens its bot detection — then you’re exporting cookies, rotating proxies, and patching extractors. We own that problem end to end. Vid Kraken completed 99.995% of downloads over the last 30 days, counted per video. See the live numbers. By Apify’s own 30-day stats (October 2026), its most-used YouTube downloader Actor completed about 95% of runs — and a run counts as succeeded even when videos inside it failed. Full breakdown in Vid Kraken vs Apify and the best YouTube download APIs compared.
No — ever. There is nothing to configure on your side. Add your API key and start downloading.
Some videos can’t be fetched by anyone — age-restricted, members-only, private, geo-blocked, or DRM-protected. When that happens you get a clear, machine-readable error code (such as AGE_RESTRICTED, MEMBERS_ONLY, GEO_RESTRICTED, PRIVATE_VIDEO, DRM_PROTECTED, or VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE) instead of a silent failure, so you always know exactly what happened.
MP4 video up to 4K (1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, and 4K on request) defaults to H.264. Only when a video isn’t available in H.264 do we deliver the best available codec at the requested quality. Audio as a real 320 kbps MP3, as YouTube's AAC stream in an M4A file, or as the original stream with no re-encoding. You can trim to a start/end time and pick a specific audio language for dubbed videos. Every completed job reports the format it actually delivered.
You pay for bandwidth only. Each plan includes a monthly bandwidth allowance; every download counts its actual file size against it, with a 20 MB minimum per download. No per-download fees. Metadata lookups and polling for job status are always free. Plans start at $99/mo (Starter— 400 GB) and come in larger sizes at the same per-GB rate, with pay-as-you-go bandwidth overage past the included amount. Or skip the subscription: pay as you go is a one-time $49 to start, then top up as you need. See Pricing for details.
Yes. If you need more than the Scale plan’s volume, we build custom plans with committed bandwidth and rates as low as $0.06/GB. Just get in touch and we’ll set you up.
Yes — create an API key and start downloading for free, no credit card required.
You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to download any content you access. We do not allow or support downloading copyrighted material.
Fixing an error or learning yt-dlp? Start here.
How to use yt-dlp
The practical guide — install, download, formats, and audio.
Fix yt-dlp 403 Forbidden
Why it happens and every fix that works.
Fix “confirm you’re not a bot”
Clear YouTube’s bot check in yt-dlp.
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