Vid Kraken — YouTube Download API

REST API to download videos from YouTube and to fetch direct download links from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Getting Started

• Sign up at vidkraken.com

• Grab your API key from the dashboard

• Pass it on every request as: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Usage & billing

You pay for bandwidth only. Every plan includes a monthly bandwidth allowance; each download counts its actual file size against it, with a 20 MB minimum per download. There are no per-download fees. Downloads and metadata lookups are counted against generous per-plan quotas that are sized so bandwidth always runs out first. Failures are never charged.

Polling endpoints (GET /download/{jobId}, GET /info/{jobId}, GET /client-download/{jobId}) are free, as is GET /me for checking your plan and remaining balances. Failed jobs, auth failures (401) and limit errors (403, 429) are not charged.

Each account may have at most 100 downloads queued or in progress at once; POST /download returns 429 beyond that until some finish. Every POST /download response carries the IETF RateLimit-Policy and RateLimit headers for this cap ("pending";r=37 means 37 more downloads can be queued now), and the 429 adds Retry-After.

Safe retries (Idempotency-Key)

POST /download and POST /info accept an optional Idempotency-Key header (any unique string, e.g. a UUID). If a request times out or the connection drops, retry it with the same key: you get the original job back instead of starting, and paying for, a second one. Keys are kept for 24 hours per account. Reusing a key with a different body returns 422; retrying while the first request is still running returns 409 (wait Retry-After seconds). Failed requests aren't stored, so retrying one with the same key runs it again. A replayed response carries Idempotent-Replayed: true.

Errors

Every error response is JSON with a human-readable error and a machine-readable code (see ApiError); some add details. Branch on code, not on the message:

A download that was accepted but then failed is not an HTTP error: its status response says FAILED with an errorCode for the video (see DownloadErrorCode).

Versioning and deprecation

The API is versioned in the path (/api/v2). Within v2 we only make backward-compatible changes: new endpoints, new optional request fields, new response fields and new enum values, so handle unknown code, errorCode and status values gracefully. Breaking changes ship as a new version (/api/v3), and v2 keeps working alongside it.

Before an endpoint, field or version is removed, you get at least 3 months' notice: account owners are emailed, the change is documented here, and affected responses carry a Deprecation header (RFC 9745) and a Sunset header (RFC 8594) with the removal date, plus a Link to migration notes. Nothing is deprecated today.