Formatim — Readable Transcripts for YouTube

Turn YouTube captions into a readable document — every word the speaker said, with the headings and paragraphs speech never had.

Formatim turns a YouTube video's captions into a document you can actually read: real headings, real paragraphs, and the speaker's own words — without leaving the page. It is not a summariser. Nothing is paraphrased, shortened, or invented. THE RULES IT WORKS BY • Never paraphrases. It restructures the speaker's own sentences instead of rewriting them into someone else's words. • Never adds. No framing, no context, no ideas that weren't in the video. • Never invents. If speech recognition garbled a name, it stays garbled rather than being replaced with a plausible-sounding guess. • Never shortens. Every example, number, name and aside is still there — the finished document runs 97–100% the length of the caption track it came from. • Never translates. A bilingual talk stays bilingual, headings included. HOW IT WORKS 1. Open any YouTube video. The panel is already under the player, styled to match YouTube in light and dark mode. Nothing to launch, no URL to paste. 2. Sign in with Google. Your account starts with 20 free credits — roughly 90 minutes of video. No card, at any point. 3. Pick a caption language if there's more than one. The panel shows the exact credit cost and the rough processing time before you commit to anything. 4. Read the document inline, or copy it, download it, or open it full width in the reader. WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH THE RESULT • Copy the whole document with formatting intact — straight into Notion, Obsidian, a doc, or a prompt. • Download it as Markdown, HTML or PDF, named after the video. Real files, not a blob to clean up. • Open it full width on formatim.app to read or print properly. • Find it again later: every document you make is kept in your library. • Re-open a video you've already processed in the same language and it's free and instant — you never pay twice for it. CAPTIONS IT CAN READ Over 100 languages — whatever caption tracks the video itself offers. Where a video has both a written and an auto-generated track for a language, the written one wins: it's punctuated, and it's what the speaker actually said. A video with no captions at all has nothing to restructure. WHO IT'S FOR • Students and researchers who need text they can quote and cite, because the wording is the speaker's own. • Knowledge workers and creators turning talks into notes, docs and downstream content. • Anyone who wants to skim the headings first and then read only the parts that matter — with no summary deciding that for them. • Non-native speakers who would rather read at their own pace than fight an accent or audio quality. • Anyone who simply reads faster than they listen, and wants to search and re-read. ACCOUNT AND PRICING A free Google sign-in is required — it creates your account and holds your credit balance. Processing runs on our servers and costs credits, and the panel shows the exact cost before each job. New accounts get 20 free credits, valid for 30 days, with no card required. After that there are monthly plans: Starter $9.99 for 200 credits a month, Plus $24.99 for 650, Pro $59.99 for 1,800. You can cancel any time from your account page and keep the month you've already paid for. Payments are handled by Paddle as merchant of record, who add any applicable VAT or sales tax at checkout. If a job fails, its credits are returned automatically. PRIVACY The extension sends the caption track of the video you choose, so it can be processed into your document, along with that video's title and channel so the document can be labelled in your library, and your Google account's email and name to identify your account. Nothing else is collected, and nothing is sold. Full policy: https://formatim.app/privacy Support: https://formatim.app/support