Company
About Vid Kraken
Vid Kraken is a managed YouTube download API. Developers send a YouTube URL and get back a direct link to the finished MP4 or audio file: MP3, AAC (M4A) or the original stream. We run the part that keeps breaking — bot detection, proxies, cookies, retries and YouTube's frequent changes — so our customers don't have to maintain download pipelines of their own.
Who we build for
SaaS products and AI teams that bring YouTube video into their own product: transcription and dubbing pipelines, clipping and editing tools, media automation and archiving. More than 20 SaaS companies use Vid Kraken in production, most of them after their own yt-dlp setups or proxy-based pipelines kept failing.
Reliability, published
We publish our download success rate live, counted per video and broken down by day, at vidkraken.com/reliability. When a video truly can't be downloaded — age-restricted, private, geo-blocked, members-only — the API says so with a machine-readable error code instead of a vague failure, and failed downloads are never charged.
How we price
You pay for bandwidth only: there are no per-download fees, and polling, metadata lookups and failed downloads are free. Plans start at $99 per month, or pay as you go from a one-time $49. It's free to start, with no credit card. See pricing.
For developers and AI agents
A REST API documented with OpenAPI (docs), official SDKs and a command-line tool for JavaScript (npm) and Python (PyPI) with source on GitHub, and a remote MCP server listed in the official MCP Registry so Claude and other agents can use Vid Kraken directly. llms.txt summarises all of it for AI assistants.
Responsible use
Vid Kraken is for content you own or have the rights to use. We do not allow or support downloading copyrighted material, and you are responsible for having the right to download anything you request. See our terms and privacy policy.
Get in touch
Email [email protected], or see the contact page for support, sales and billing.