I built a YouTube digest tool for myself and used it daily for a year. This week I finally made it ready for other people.

I subscribe to a lot of YouTube channels. Creators I actually like, stuff I actually want to watch.

The problem is I could never keep up with them. There's no good way to track when your favorite channels post something new, so eventually you stop trying and just let the algorithm decide what you watch. Which is great for discovering new creators, and then adding them to the pile of channels you never keep up with.

So I built a tool. It scans all the channels I follow, pulls transcripts from anything new, summarizes it, and sends me one clean email. A digest of everything worth knowing. No app to open. No algorithm. Just a newsletter in my inbox when there's something new.

Three things happened that I didn't fully expect. First, I actually stayed on top of my channels for the first time ever. Second, I realized I don't always need to watch the video. Half the time the summary is enough and I can move on. Third, I started aggressively adding new channels because there's no guilt anymore. If a creator looks interesting, I add them. I'll get a clean summary when they post something and decide then if it's worth my time. And if a channel stops being interesting, I remove them just as fast. The whole thing is low commitment. My channel list is probably twice what it used to be and I'm more informed, not less.

I used it every day for about a year before showing it to anyone.
That part matters. I wasn't building for a market. I was scratching my own itch and getting genuinely better at staying on top of content I cared about. The product got sharp because I was a real user with real opinions about what made it worse.

Honestly I don't know if I'm the only person who wants this. My real life friends don't use YouTube the way I do, so I can't get signal from them. But if even a tiny fraction of YouTube's audience follows channels they actually care about and never gets around to watching them, that's a lot of people.

So this is me finding out. If that problem sounds familiar, I'd love for you to try it and tell me if it helps or if I've built something nobody wants. Free to try, 10 channel limit on the free tier, no credit card needed to sign up.

Here's what the digest email looks like