Show IH: I built a tool that turns YouTube/TikTok/Instagram videos into text + AI summaries

I kept running into the same problem: long YouTube talks, podcasts, and tutorials I wanted to skim, search, or reference later — but there's no good way to do that with video. So I built SummarizeVideoToText

over a few weekends.

What it does

Paste a public YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link and you get:

- Full transcript (pulled from captions when available, AI transcription when not — mostly needed for TikTok/Instagram)

- AI summary + timestamped chapters

- A mind map of the content

- A Q&A panel you can ask follow-up questions against the video

Bilingual UI (English/Chinese) since I wanted it usable outside just the US market.

Free tier / pricing (being upfront about this)

- No account: 2 summaries/day, videos up to 15 min

- Free Google login: 10/day, videos up to 1 hour, unlocks TikTok/Instagram + history

- Already-summarized videos are cached — reopening one is instant and free for anyone, forever, no quota hit

- Pro ($9/mo or $54/yr): no daily cap, videos up to 6 hours — for people who use this heavily (podcasters, researchers, etc.)

Just flipped this over to live Stripe payments (with Stripe Managed Payments handling tax) this week, so it's a real, working checkout now, not a "coming soon" button.

Stack

Next.js (App Router), Postgres on Neon, next-intl for i18n, Stripe for billing. Also shipped a small Chrome extension this week — click the toolbar icon on a YouTube/TikTok/Instagram tab and it jumps straight

to the summary page, no copy-pasting links.

What I'm figuring out next

- Whether the free tier is too generous or not generous enough (caching means repeat views are basically free for me, so I can afford to be loose here)

- Whether to add channel/playlist bulk extraction — a few competitors have this and it seems to matter for power users

- SEO is currently driven by auto-generated pages per summarized video; curious if that's sustainable long-term vs. building an audience some other way

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's tried to monetize a "free scraping tool with a thin AI layer on top" — that positioning is trickier than it sounds.