yt-dlp and homegrown scrapers keep hitting “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” 403 errors. We handle YouTube’s bot detection for you — no cookies, no proxies, no babysitting. Send a URL, get your file.
Free to start · No credit card · First download in minutes
$ 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..."
}YouTube fights downloaders harder every month. DIY tooling breaks constantly.
[cron] 03:00 import-worker: fetching new uploads...
Mon ok 142 videos imported
Tue ok 137 videos imported
Wed ok 151 videos imported
Thu FAIL 0 imported
ERROR: [youtube] Sign in to confirm you're not a bot.
job failed — paging on-call at 3:14amDatacenter IPs get blocked
Unauthenticated requests from servers trip YouTube’s bot checks almost instantly.
Cookies & proxies rot
Exporting cookies and renting proxies is constant, fragile maintenance that breaks in production.
YouTube keeps changing
Every extractor change means another emergency update to keep your downloads alive.
Every break means lost engineering hours — and users staring at a feature that suddenly stopped working.
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 70+ 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://youtube-download-api.org/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://youtube-download-api.org/api/v2/download/JOB_ID \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
# → { "status": "COMPLETED",
# "downloadUrl": "https://cdn.youtube-download-api.org/...",
# "fileSize": 32240544 }No hidden fees. Scale as you grow.
Perfect for most use cases
Questions? Email us at support@youtube-download-api.org
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.
Free 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.
Credits. Downloads cost 10 credits per GB delivered; metadata lookups are cheap, and polling for job status is always free. The Pro plan includes 20,000 credits a month — around 2,000 downloads. See Pricing for details.
Yes. If you need more than the Pro plan’s volume, we build custom plans sized to your demand. 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.