Send a YouTube URL, get a direct download from our CDN.
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..."
}You’ve tried the RapidAPI listings. Oxylabs. A dozen other services. They all break the same way — 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 work on your end.
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
“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.
Everything you need to ship downloads in production
1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, 240p, 144p video and MP3 audio — every format you need.
Finished files are served straight from our CDN. Fast, direct URLs — no redirects, no hassle.
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.
Submit, poll, download. 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 or save directly from our CDN. That’s it.
Your App
POST /api/v2/download
Poll Status
GET /api/v2/download/{jobId}
Download
Direct CDN 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 }No hidden fees. Scale as you grow.
For small projects & indie devs
($0.10 per download)
Additional usage
Best value for production
($0.05 per download)
Additional usage
For platforms at volume
($0.025 per download)
Additional usage
Committed download volume at negotiated rates — custom formats and a dedicated support channel.
Estimate your monthly cost from your expected usage.
Starter — est. $99/month
Everything fits in the base plan
The same workload elsewhere
123 GB* of traffic a month. What that costs on:
DIY yt-dlp + residential proxies ($5/GB)
~$615/month84% cheaper with us
Apify residential bandwidth ($7/GB)
~$861/month89% cheaper with us
Bandwidth cost alone — before servers, maintenance and keeping up with YouTube changes.
* Estimated from averages across real downloads; actual sizes vary with content.
Questions? Email us at hello@vidkraken.com
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. You send a URL and get a working download; we keep it working as YouTube changes.
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 from 1080p down to 144p, plus MP3 audio. You can trim to a start/end time and pick a specific audio language for dubbed videos.
Each plan includes a monthly download quota plus bandwidth, measured by actual file size. Metadata lookups have their own quota (5× your downloads) and polling for job status is always free. Plans start at $99/mo (Starter — 1,000 downloads + 400 GB), with pay-as-you-go overage past the included amounts. 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 $0.12/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.
Best yt-dlp alternatives
youtube-dl, pytube, cobalt, and APIs compared.
Is yt-dlp safe?
Malware myths, safe sources, and privacy.
yt-dlp commands cheat sheet
The commands you’ll actually use.