The daily budget
A Google Cloud project that enables the YouTube Data API gets 10,000 quota units per day by default. The budget belongs to the project, not to an API key, so extra keys in the same project share it. It resets at midnight Pacific Time. Every request costs at least one unit, even an invalid one.
What each call costs
| Call | Units | Calls per day on 10,000 |
|---|---|---|
search.list (keyword search, per page) | 100 | 100 |
videos.list (video details) | 1 | 10,000 |
channels.list (channel details) | 1 | 10,000 |
commentThreads.list (comments, per page) | 1 | 10,000 |
Source: Google's YouTube Data API quota calculator. Each further page of results costs the call's units again. Costs change; check Google's calculator before you plan.
Reading is cheap. Search is the bottleneck: a search page returns up to 50 videos, so 100 searches a day means at most about 5,000 search results a day, per project.
Getting more quota
There's no paid upgrade. To raise the limit you fill in Google's quota extension form and pass a compliance audit of your app against YouTube's API terms. There's no guaranteed timeline, and the audit looks at how you store and display YouTube data.
When the official API is the right choice
- You mostly read video, channel or comment details (1 unit each).
- You upload videos or manage your own channel (uploads need OAuth and cost more units).
- You're comfortable with Google Cloud projects and API key management.
If that's you, the official API is free and you should use it.
When quota gets in the way
Keyword monitoring, research across many channels and AI agents that search often run out of quota by mid-morning. Vanefeed's YouTube API has no daily quota: you pay per result in credits, and you can go as far as your balance goes.
| Endpoint | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
youtube/profile | Subscribers, exact video count, total views, join date, country | 1 credit |
youtube/posts | A channel's videos or shorts with views, likes and duration | 2 credits per 20 |
youtube/comments | Comments under a video | 2 credits per 20 |
youtube/search | Video search, with language and country | 3 credits per 20 |
5,000 search results cost 750 credits, about $0.75–$1.10 on our packs. Failed calls cost nothing.
Try it
# search YouTube for 100 videos (15 credits, no quota)
curl -G "https://api.vanefeed.com/v1/youtube/search" \
--data-urlencode "q=electric cars review" -d limit=100 \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VANEFEED_KEY"import os, requests
r = requests.get("https://api.vanefeed.com/v1/youtube/search",
params={"q": "electric cars review", "limit": 100},
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['VANEFEED_KEY']}"})
for video in r.json()["data"]:
print(video["published_at"], video["text"][:80])100 free credits
Enough for about 650 search results or 1,000 comments. No card needed.