publicapidata
Public data extraction · measured

Most extraction guides tell you what should work. This one tells you what did.

Every claim on this site carries a date and a sample size. When a method fails, the page says so, including the cases no tool can fix.

Try a transcript freeRead the reliability benchmark
Tools running
13
Pages of evidence
17
Last measured
3 Sept 2026
youtube transcripts · success by egress2 Sep 2026
Residentialn=150
100%
Datacentern=12
58%
No proxyn=12
0%
174
videos in sample
3
egress arms
0%
without a proxy
Where the request leaves from decides almost everything. Arms have unequal sample sizes; thebenchmark says where that matters.
  • YouTubeYouTube Transcript Scraper$5.00 / 1,000 transcripts
  • YouTubeYouTube Channel Transcript Scraper$5.00 / 1,000 transcripts
  • YouTubeYouTube Playlist Transcript Scraper$5.00 / 1,000 transcripts
  • YouTubeYouTube Shorts Transcript Scraper$5.00 / 1,000 transcripts
  • YouTubeYouTube Search to Transcripts$5.00 / 1,000 transcripts
  • YouTubeYouTube Comments Scraper$3.00 / 1,000 comments
  • AudioPodcast Transcript Scraper$1.00 / 1,000 transcripts
  • Business dataVerified Website Contact Finder$10.00 / 1,000 domains
  • Business dataJob Postings Scraper$2.00 / 1,000 roles
  • Business dataApp Store Reviews Scraper$0.10 / 1,000 reviews
  • SocialTelegram Channel Scraper$3.00 / 1,000 messages
  • SocialBluesky Posts Scraper$3.00 / 1,000 posts
  • SocialThreads Posts Scraper$3.00 / 1,000 posts
[ 01 / 04 ] · Benchmarks

Re-run monthly. Re-dated every time.

Success rates by environment, failure modes, and how each of those moves month to month. If a number here is stale, that is a bug.All benchmarks →

3 Sept 2026How many company websites publish a contact address?16% of 400 domains yielded an email address. Measured 3 September 2026, with failures split: dead domains, sites refusing crawlers, sites publishing nothing.2 Sept 2026YouTube transcript API reliability: measured resultsMeasured success rates for YouTube transcript extraction across residential, datacenter and unproxied egress. 150 videos, 2 September 2026.
[ 02 / 04 ] · Playbooks

One business per page, costed to the cent.

What the input actually costs at our published prices, what the output sells for, and the work in between that nobody else mentions.All playbooks →

$0.003per commentSell audience research built from product commentsSells for $2,000-6,000 per reporta weekend to set up$0.01per domainSell B2B lead lists that separate role from personalSells for $0.50-1.00 per verified rowa week to set up$0.005per transcriptCompetitor video intelligence as a monthly retainerSells for $800-2,000 per montha week to set up$0.005per transcriptSell study guides built from public video coursesSells for $19-49 per guidea weekend to set up$0.005per transcriptBuild a niche answer assistant on video transcriptsSells for $8,000-20,000 build, then $400-1,200 a montha few weeks to set up$0.005per transcriptPodcast clip service: sell short-form from a back catalogueSells for $150-400 per episodea weekend to set up
[ 03 / 04 ] · Method

How a number gets onto this site

The tools are the instrument. Running them for customers produces the measurements; the site is where those measurements go.

  1. 01

    Run at volume

    The same tools that serve customers run against hundreds of inputs, from more than one network.

  2. 02

    Count every outcome

    Success, block, and the inputs that had nothing to return. Each is a row, and none are dropped.

  3. 03

    Publish with the date and the n

    A figure without both is a claim. With both it is a measurement someone else can check.

[ 04 / 04 ] · Guides

Useful to someone who never buys anything.

Each guide owns one search query and answers it in the first paragraph. That is also what makes them worth finding.All guides →

find company contact detailsFind company contact details from a domain nameHow to get an email, phone number and social profile for a company from its domain alone — what is findable, what is not, and why many sites return nothing.role emails websiteRole emails vs personal: why lead lists need both splitWhy info@ and jane.smith@ are different kinds of data, how to tell them apart from a domain, and how to filter the placeholder addresses real companies publish.youtube shorts transcriptYouTube Shorts transcripts: the format most tools skipHow to get captions from YouTube Shorts in bulk, why most transcript tools return nothing for them, and what Shorts text is actually good for.conference talk transcriptsConference talk transcripts: read a whole trackHow to turn a conference playlist into searchable text, find the talks worth watching, and cite quotes with timestamps that link to the moment.course transcriptsCourse transcripts: turn a video course into notesHow to get the transcript of every lesson in a video course, build revision notes you can search, and use an LLM to summarise without inventing content.lecture transcriptsLecture transcripts: archive a university channelHow to extract transcripts for every lecture on a university channel, organise them per video, use them for accessibility, and build a research corpus.youtube transcript api not workingYouTube transcript API not working: how to diagnose itWorks locally, fails in production? Empty response bodies? A symptom-by-symptom diagnosis of YouTube transcript API failures and what each one means.
Directory

Thirteen tools, each with its limit stated.

Every row on the directory says what comes back, what it costs, and what it will not do. The limit is usually the thing you needed to know before you started.Open the directory →

06YouTubeYouTube Transcript · YouTube Channel Transcript · YouTube Playlist Transcript · YouTube Shorts Transcript · YouTube Search to Transcripts · YouTube Comments01AudioPodcast Transcript03Business dataVerified Website Contact Finder · Job Postings · App Store Reviews03SocialTelegram Channel · Bluesky Posts · Threads Posts
Why this exists

Running extraction at volume produces data nobody publishes.

We publish and maintain data-extraction tools on Apify. Running them for customers produces measurements: success rates by environment, failure modes, and how each of those changes over time. Most of that is not written down anywhere, so this is where it goes.

The tools are linked where they are relevant. The pages are written to stand up without them.

See the tools on Apify →