Supadata: The Complete Guide

1. Introduction

If you're building AI products, content repurposing tools, or data pipelines, you've hit the same wall everyone does: getting clean, structured text from videos and web pages is surprisingly hard. YouTube doesn't offer a public transcript API. TikTok and Instagram make scraping a nightmare. And web content is buried under JavaScript, ads, and paywalls.

Supadata solves this with a simple premise: give it a URL — whether it's a YouTube video, a TikTok clip, an Instagram reel, an X post, or any web page — and get back clean, structured JSON with transcripts, metadata, and extracted text.^[1]

This guide covers everything: what Supadata is, how it works, who it's for, what it costs, and how real developers are using it in production. Whether you're evaluating it for a project or just curious about the web-to-text API space, this is the definitive resource.

2. What Is Supadata?

Supadata is a web and video-to-text API built for developers and makers. Founded by Rafal Zawadzki, the company is headquartered in the Netherlands and positions itself as the fastest way to turn online content into structured data for AI applications.^[2]

At its core, Supadata offers three main services:

• Video Transcripts — Extract transcripts from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), and hosted video/audio files. If a video doesn't have native captions, Supadata generates them using AI transcription.^[3]
• Web Reader — Extract clean, readable content from any website. Crawl pages and pull structured data — no headless browsers or proxy management required.
• Media Metadata — Get social media post data including title, author, engagement metrics, and YouTube channel/playlist metadata.

Everything is returned as clean JSON via a RESTful API. The design philosophy is explicitly minimalist — two universal endpoints handle video and web content across all platforms, rather than requiring platform-specific integrations.^[1]

How It Works

The workflow is straightforward:

1. Sign up at dash.supadata.ai and get your API key
2. Make an HTTP request with the content URL and your API key
3. Receive structured JSON with the transcript, text content, or metadata

# Get a YouTube transcript
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.supadata.ai/v1/youtube/transcript?videoId=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

# Extract web page content
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.supadata.ai/v1/web/read?url=https://example.com"

3. Key Features

3.1 Multi-Platform Video Transcripts

One API, six platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), and direct video/audio file URLs (e.g., files hosted on S3). This is Supadata's flagship feature. Instead of building separate scrapers for each platform, you use the same endpoint for all of them.^[4]

3.2 AI-Powered Transcription Fallback

When a video doesn't have native captions, Supadata's AI pipeline generates transcripts automatically. This costs 2 credits per minute of audio (vs. 1 credit for native transcripts) but ensures you never get an empty response. Timestamps are included for each segment.^[3]

3.3 Web Content Extraction

The Web Reader endpoint converts any URL into clean, structured text. It handles JavaScript-rendered pages, removes ads and navigation chrome, and returns the main content. You can also crawl sitemaps to extract content from an entire site.^[3]

3.4 YouTube Metadata

Beyond transcripts, Supadata extracts rich YouTube metadata: video details (title, description, views, likes, comments), channel information, and playlist contents — all without dealing with the YouTube Data API's quotas.^[3]

3.5 Transcript Translation

Translate transcripts to other languages directly through the API. This costs 30 credits per minute of content and enables multi-lingual content pipelines.^[5]

3.6 SDKs and Integrations

Supadata offers official SDKs for JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, plus integrations with popular automation platforms:^[3]

• n8n — Native node for workflow automation
• Make (Integromat) — Pre-built modules
• Zapier — Zap triggers and actions
• Active Pieces — Open-source automation integration
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Direct integration with AI assistants and agents^[6]
• LangChain — For building LLM-powered applications

3.7 MCP Server

Supadata offers an official MCP server that brings video and web data extraction directly into AI-powered workflows. This means AI agents (like Claude, ChatGPT with tools, or custom agents) can call Supadata endpoints as part of their tool use — extracting transcripts or web content mid-conversation.^[6]

4. Use Cases

🤖 AI Chatbots and Agents

Feed real-time web and video content into AI agents. Use Supadata's MCP server to give your AI assistant the ability to read any web page or transcribe any video on demand. Perfect for research agents, customer support bots that reference product videos, or content-aware assistants.

🔄 Content Repurposing

Turn YouTube videos into blog posts, newsletters, or social media threads. Extract the transcript, run it through an LLM for summarization and reformatting, and publish. Entire content repurposing businesses run on this pipeline.

📊 Brand Mention Monitoring

Track what people are saying about your brand in videos across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Extract transcripts at scale, search for brand mentions, and feed results into your analytics dashboard.

🔬 Research and Data Mining

Academic researchers and market analysts use Supadata to build datasets from video content. Extract transcripts from hundreds of YouTube videos on a topic, analyze sentiment, identify trends, and build structured datasets.

📝 Content Moderation

Automatically extract text from user-submitted video content for moderation pipelines. Check transcripts against content policies without manually watching every video.

📈 Marketing Research

Analyze competitor YouTube channels, extract transcripts from industry conference talks, or monitor trending topics across video platforms. Build competitive intelligence pipelines that run automatically.

🎓 Education and Accessibility

Generate transcripts for educational videos that lack captions. Build study tools that convert lecture recordings into searchable, summarized notes.

5. How People Use It on X

Supadata has a growing presence in the developer and AI builder community on X (formerly Twitter). Here are the patterns and conversations we see:

🔥 Trending Use Cases on X

• AI agent builders — Developers share workflows where Supadata's MCP server powers AI agents that can "watch" YouTube videos or "read" any web page as part of their reasoning process.
• Content repurposing threads — Makers demonstrate pipelines: "YouTube video → Supadata transcript → GPT-4 summary → blog post → Twitter thread" — all automated with n8n or Make.
• Vibe coding — Developers building with AI assistants mention using Supadata's llms.txt documentation endpoint to give their coding AI full context about the API.
• "No more scraping" posts — Developers share relief at not having to maintain YouTube scrapers that break every time the platform updates.

💡 Community Tips

• Start with the free tier — 100 credits/month is enough to prototype and validate your use case before committing to a paid plan.
• Use the MCP integration — If you're building AI agents, the MCP server is the fastest path to giving your agent web and video understanding.
• Batch with n8n — For bulk extraction, n8n workflows with Supadata nodes can process hundreds of URLs overnight on autopilot.
• AI fallback is worth the 2x cost — For videos without captions, the AI-generated transcript is surprisingly accurate and includes timestamps.
• Check the Python SDK — Simpler than raw HTTP for most use cases. pip install supadata and you're running in minutes.

6. Getting Started

Here's how to go from zero to extracting data in under 5 minutes:

Step 1: Create an Account

Go to dash.supadata.ai and sign up. Your API key is generated automatically during onboarding. The free tier gives you 100 credits/month — no credit card required.^[3]

Step 2: Make Your First API Call

Test with a simple curl command:

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.supadata.ai/v1/youtube/transcript?videoId=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

Step 3: Install an SDK (Optional)

For a cleaner developer experience:

# JavaScript/TypeScript
npm install @supadata/js

# Python
pip install supadata

Step 4: Use in Your Code

# Python example
from supadata import Supadata

client = Supadata(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")

# Get a YouTube transcript
transcript = client.youtube.transcript(video_id="dQw4w9WgXcQ")
print(transcript)

# Read a web page
content = client.web.read(url="https://example.com")
print(content)

Step 5: Explore Integrations

Connect to your existing workflow tools: add the Supadata node in n8n, use the Make module for no-code automations, or set up the MCP server for AI agent integration.^[6]

7. Pricing

Supadata uses a credit-based system. One credit equals one transcript fetch or one URL extraction. AI-generated transcripts cost 2 credits per minute, and translation costs 30 credits per minute. Plans start free and scale with usage:^[5]

All paid plans include yearly billing options at a discount. Credits do not roll over. Auto Recharge lets you automatically purchase more credits when you approach your limit. Some endpoints (like translation) are only available on paid plans.^[5]

8. Pros & Cons

✅ Pros

• Universal API design — Two endpoints handle all platforms. No platform-specific integrations to manage. Clean, simple JSON output.^[4]
• AI transcription fallback — Never get an empty response. If native captions don't exist, AI generates them with timestamps.
• Generous free tier — 100 credits/month is enough to prototype and validate before paying anything.
• Excellent SDK and integration ecosystem — Python, JavaScript, n8n, Make, Zapier, MCP, LangChain — covers most developer workflows.^[3]
• No proxies or headless browsers needed — Supadata handles the infrastructure. You just call the API.
• MCP server for AI agents — First-class support for the emerging AI agent ecosystem.^[6]
• Scales to zero pricing — Cost per credit decreases as you scale up.
• Multi-platform coverage — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and web — all from one API key.

❌ Cons

• Credits don't roll over — Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle.^[5]
• AI transcription costs 2x — Videos without native captions consume credits faster, which can add up for large-scale processing.
• Translation is expensive — At 30 credits/minute, translating long videos can burn through credits quickly.
• Relatively new product — Smaller community and fewer third-party resources compared to established players.
• Rate limits on lower tiers — Free and starter plans have lower rate limits that may bottleneck batch processing.
• Premium endpoints locked to paid plans — Some features require a paid subscription.
• No on-premise option — All processing goes through Supadata's cloud infrastructure.

9. Competitors