ReadTube

Turn YouTube subscriptions into a personal newsletter. Reclaim focus in a world engineered for distraction.

Live at read.tube.

What it does

ReadTube converts the YouTube channels you follow into readable, searchable articles so you can consume videos without being pulled into the feed.

• Subscribe to channels. Point ReadTube at the YouTube channels you care about. New videos show up in your inbox, not in an autoplay queue.
• Read instead of watch. Each video is transcribed and turned into a clean, readable page — with the original video embedded for when you want it.
• Search across everything. Full-text search over transcripts lets you find the moment you remember without scrubbing a timeline.
• Annotate and save. Highlight passages and come back to them later; your subscriptions become a personal knowledge base instead of a feed.
• Skim, don't doomscroll. An inbox-style layout puts you in control of what you open and when.

Why

YouTube is a great source of ideas and a terrible place to think. Long videos bury the substance; the homepage is optimized for the next click, not for you. ReadTube strips the video feed down to the parts you actually subscribed for and hands them back in a format built for reading.

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md for local development.

Deployment

ReadTube self-hosts on the following stack:

• Vercel: Hosts the Next.js app, runs scheduled cron jobs, and routes LLM and embedding calls through the AI Gateway.
• Postgres: Application database (with pgvector for semantic search). Any managed Postgres works.
• Clerk: Authentication and user management.
• Transcript API: Transcript vendor for YouTube.
• JustOneAPI: Channel metadata and transcript vendor for Bilibili.

Deploy on Vercel

1. Fork the repo and import it as a new Vercel project. Set the root directory to apps/web — Vercel will detect Next.js automatically.
2. Provision a Postgres database (with pgvector enabled) and run the migrations: yarn db:deploy against the production DATABASE_URL.
3. Add the environment variables from DEVELOPMENT.md to the Vercel project (Postgres URL, Clerk keys, Transcript API key, JustOneAPI token, AI Gateway key, CRON_SECRET).
   • The CRON_SECRET can be any random string (e.g. openssl rand -hex 32). Just make sure to set the same value in Vercel and in the .env file for local development.
4. Enable the Vercel AI Gateway on the project so LLM and embedding calls route through it.
5. Deploy. The cron in apps/web/vercel.json (/api/cron/refresh-channels, every 30 min) is registered automatically.

License

ReadTube is licensed under the Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2).