About Captain Transcribe

Captain Transcribe started as a solo project by The Captain — an independent builder who got tired of paying twenty dollars a month for transcription tools that were slow, locked behind enterprise sales calls, or stuffed with features nobody asked for. The first version was a personal tool used to subtitle a few YouTube videos faster than DaVinci Resolve could. After friends started asking to use it, it became a public product. What started as a weekend script now serves thousands of users across 29+ languages, with no investors, no marketing team, and no roadmap dictated by quarterly metrics.

Make accurate audio and video transcription accessible to everyone — content creators, journalists, students, podcasters, video editors, researchers — at a price that respects independent budgets. We believe transcription is infrastructure, not a luxury, and we price it accordingly. Every plan, including the free tier, uses the same high-quality models and supports the same export formats. There is no premium tier hiding the good engine; the engine is the same for everyone.

Captain Transcribe runs on state-of-the-art speech-to-text models — primarily OpenAI Whisper and AssemblyAI — selected per file based on language, audio quality, and duration. Files are processed on European servers, exported in TXT, SRT, or VTT, and offered in three subtitle styles: Standard for YouTube, Short for TikTok and Reels, and Word-by-word for karaoke-style captions. We support 29+ languages with automatic language detection, custom vocabulary boosts for industry-specific terms, editable timestamps, and speaker diarization on supported plans.

Captain Transcribe is built for people who actually use transcripts — not for buyers in IT departments. YouTubers and short-form creators export SRT and VTT for accessible captions in seconds. Podcasters get accurate transcripts for show notes and SEO. Journalists transcribe long interviews without paying per minute. Students subtitle lecture recordings to study. Researchers run qualitative interviews through it. Video editors avoid 30-minute manual subtitling sessions. If your work involves spoken content, Captain Transcribe was probably built with you in mind.

Captain Transcribe is bootstrapped. No investors, no growth-at-all-costs pressure, no quarterly board meetings shaping the roadmap. This means we can ship features quickly when users ask for them, keep prices low because there is no investor margin to feed, and refuse to add dark patterns just to inflate signup metrics. If you have a feature request or a bug report, the same person who reads the email also writes the code. Most fixes ship within a few days.

Your files belong to you. They are processed on European servers, never used to train AI models, and never reviewed by humans except when you explicitly contact support with a request that requires it. Files uploaded for transcription are deleted automatically after processing, unless you choose to save the result to your account history. Payment is handled by Stripe — we never see or store your card details. We are GDPR-compliant and our full data handling policy is detailed on the privacy page.

Articles published on the Captain Transcribe blog are researched and fact-checked against current technical documentation, including format specifications such as SubRip, WebVTT, and the various subtitle authoring guidelines published by YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix. Primary sources are linked in the article body, not just at the end. AI tooling is used in the writing process for drafting and rewriting, and every article is reviewed by The Captain before publication. Articles are updated when technical claims become outdated.

Have a question, feedback, or a feature request? The Captain reads every email — usually within twenty-four hours. Visit our contact page