The Problem
Every day, millions of people want to save a YouTube video — a tutorial they need offline, a music track for their commute, a lecture for later study, or a memory before it gets deleted. But the options available are uniformly terrible:
- Ad-infested websites that bury the download button under pop-ups, malware bait, and crypto miners.
- Paid services that charge monthly for something that costs them nearly nothing.
- CLI tools that require terminal knowledge most people don't have.
- Broken solutions that stop working after YouTube's next update.
The internet's largest library of video content should not be locked behind a wall of bad UX and greed.
Why I Built This
I built YT B0T because I believe in digital ownership. When you watch a video, you shouldn't need an internet connection to see it again. When a creator uploads a tutorial, it shouldn't vanish if their channel gets taken down. When you find a song you love, you should be able to listen to it on any device, in any app, without streaming it every time.
I was tired of bookmarking 20 different "YouTube to MP3" sites, each worse than the last. So I made one that didn't suck. One that was fast, free, open, and actually worked.
No ads. No tracking. No "Sign up for premium." No "Download our app." No "You've reached your daily limit." Just paste a URL, pick your format, and download. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Why It's Free
The API runs on Cloudflare's free tier. The code is open source. There are no servers to maintain, no bandwidth bills, no VC funding to justify. Cloudflare gives 100,000 requests/day for free, and as long as that's enough, this service stays free.
If it grows beyond that, I'll figure something out — but it will never have ads, and it will never require payment. I'd rather it slow down than sell out.
Transparency
- No logging. I don't store your IP, your downloads, or your searches.
- No cookies. No trackers. No analytics. Not even Cloudflare's.
- No encryption breaking. This uses YouTube's public streaming URLs — same as any browser.
- Open source. The entire codebase is available for anyone to inspect, fork, or self-host.
Technical Details
YT B0T is built on Cloudflare Pages + Workers using their free tier. It proxies requests to public Invidious API instances to fetch video metadata and stream URLs. No YouTube API keys, no third-party services, no hidden costs.
The stack: Vanilla JavaScript frontend, Cloudflare Workers backend, Invidious API as the data source. Entirely serverless, globally distributed, and costs me nothing to run.
What's Next
- Playlist downloading
- Batch downloads
- Subtitles/captions download
- Thumbnail download
- Better format grouping and filtering
Requests? Open an issue.
"The internet is not a library that you can browse — it's a stream that you can drink from. But sometimes you want to bottle some of it for later."
— Someone on Hacker News, probably
— The Operator