Hi Product Hunt 👋

I'm Liren, author of ReadTube. This is an app that turns YouTube subscriptions into a personal newsletter.

YouTube has lots of high quality content. But videos can be difficult to consume efficiently, especially those that are long and about series topics (e.g. general relativity, quantum physics). So I created this app to solve this need.

There are already tons of existing YouTube AI transcription websites. However, ReadTube is one step further in that it periodically fetches the updates from the channels I subscribe to so I don't need to paste in the video URL each time. Also it can generate two different versions of summaries: one short and one long, as well as a full length article. I can pick which length to consume according to the type of videos.

Some other features: playlist import, translation, custom folders, notes, semantic search. I also plan to add chatting with videos in the future.

I use the Transcript API to get transcripts for YouTube videos (https://transcriptapi.com), and JustOneAPI for Bilibili (https://justoneapi.com). These services rely on the video's native transcripts. So this app does have one limitation that if a video has no native transcript, it won't work.

The app is built with the "standard" stack: Next.js on Vercel, Tailwind CSS, Postgres on Neon / Prisma, Clerk for auth, GPT for summary and article generation. This is my first fully agentically coded project. Claude Code did most of the heavy lifting. I set up the infra and worked as a PM.

It is source available under the Elastic License 2.0, and free during beta.

Personally, I really enjoy using this app. There are so many seemingly interesting but long interview videos that I would be curious about but never have the time to check out (e.g. Lex Fridman's channel). Now I can easily skim through the summary and decide whether it is worth reading or watching. Hope that it is helpful to you too.

Watch less. Read more.

-- Liren

Website: https://read.tube

Source code: https://github.com/tuliren/readtube