Podcast transcription, one API call.
Podcast Transcript API: Spotify, Apple and RSS episodes to text
Spotify, Apple Podcasts or a raw RSS enclosure. We resolve the link to the real episode audio and transcribe it, however long it runs. Per-segment start times mean you can quote the exact minute a claim was made. One credit per episode, whether it is twenty minutes or three hours.
12:04The mistake was assuming the first version had to be the one we shipped forever.12:11We rewrote the pricing page four times before anything moved at all.12:19And the version that worked was the one that said the least, which surprised everyone.12:27People were not confused about the features, they were unsure whether it was for them.12:35So we cut the feature list in half and put the use case at the top instead.12:44Signups went up without a single change to the product underneath it.Podcasts are where per-minute pricing hurts.
A three-hour episode costs one credit. Transcription services that bill per audio minute charge for every one of those 180 minutes.
You are billed per audio minute, so the long episodes you most want to search are the ones you can least afford to process. You also have to find and download the audio yourself, which means resolving a Spotify or Apple link to a real file before you start.
Send the episode link. We resolve Spotify, Apple Podcasts and RSS to the underlying audio and transcribe it, at one credit regardless of runtime. Failed requests cost nothing, and a fetch that cannot be resolved tells you why.
Who it is for, and how they use it
Three ways in, depending on how you work. Same endpoint, same credit, same response shape underneath all of them.
Engineers building a product
You need episode text in a pipeline and you do not want to own the resolve-then-transcribe plumbing.
01Create a key in the dashboard, send it as a Bearer token.02POST the episode link and get a job back to poll.03Store the segments next to your other sources and move on.
Analysts and researchers
You have a back catalogue nobody has ever searched, because listening to it end to end is impossible.
01Point at the feed and collect the episode links.02Send up to 50 in one batch call.03Search the text and quote the minute something was said.
Teams building with assistants
Your agent needs to answer from an episode and cite the minute, not paraphrase a summary of it.
01Add the MCP server once, no deploy and no glue code.02Ask in plain language, the assistant calls the tool itself.03Answers come back with the timecode attached.
One request, whichever way you build.
Write code if you want to. If you would rather not, the same fetch runs from a workflow tool or straight inside an assistant.
Call the endpoint
One POST with the episode link. Long audio returns a job to poll.
Read the API reference →Drop it in a workflow
An official n8n node. Transcribe new episodes as the feed updates.
See the n8n node →curl -X POST https://transcriptfetch.com/api/v1/transcripts/video \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TRANSCRIPTFETCH_KEY" \
-d '{"video": "https://open.spotify.com/episode/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk"}'
# 202 + job_id, then poll:
# GET /api/v1/transcripts/jobs/{jobId}Let the assistant read the episode itself.
Add the MCP server once and Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can pull an episode transcript mid-conversation. Same key, same credit, no glue code and nothing to deploy.
https://transcriptfetch.com/mcp
Questions people ask first
Podcast Transcript API vs a per-minute transcription service
Neither Spotify nor Apple publishes a public transcript API. RSS is the source of record and both platforms are directories that ingest it, which is why all three link types resolve to the same episode audio here.
Why caption-only tools return nothing here
What the endpoint returns
Guides from the blog
Start with 100 free credits
Paste an episode link or copy the curl, whichever suits you. No card, no sales call.