Stop using Headless Browsers to fetch YouTube Transcripts 🚀

Fetching YouTube transcripts in Node.js usually means one of two things: fighting with heavy headless browsers or dealing with flaky, outdated scrapers. I wanted something faster, type-safe, and proxy-ready. So I built YT Caption Kit. The Problem If you are building an AI summarizer, a search engine for videos, or a language learning app, you need captions. But: Puppeteer/Playwright are overkill and resource-heavy for just fetching text. Official YouTube APIs can be restrictive or require complex OAuth flows for simple data. Formatting (like or tags) is often lost in basic scrapers. The Solution: YT Caption Kit yt-caption-kit is a lightweight, zero-browser dependency for Node.js and TypeScript that fetches transcripts directly from YouTube's internal endpoints. Why you should use it: 🚀 No Headless Browser: Extremely fast and low memory footprint. 🛡️ TypeScript First: Full autocomplete and built-in error classes (like AgeRestricted or IpBlocked). 🌍 Smart Fallbacks: Automatically prefers