How to connect Apify to Claude (MCP) and give it YouTube transcripts in 5 minutes

Disclosure: I build TubeText, a set of pay-per-result Apify Actors. The example below uses one of them. The setup works the same for any Actor in Apify Store.

Claude can't watch a YouTube video. If you paste a link, it will either refuse or guess from the title. With the Apify MCP server connected, Claude can fetch the actual transcript and work from that. It costs a fraction of a cent per video, and you don't write any code.

Here is the setup, plus what I checked myself.

What you need

• Claude (Desktop or claude.ai) with custom connectors available on your plan
• A free Apify account. The free plan includes $5 of monthly usage, enough for about 1,200 transcripts with captions.

Step 1: build your server URL

The Apify MCP server lives at https://mcp.apify.com. With no parameters, it loads a general tool set: Actor search, docs search, a web browser Actor and a few helpers. Claude then has to search Apify Store for a suitable tool every time.

For a specific job, give Claude exactly the tool it needs with the tools parameter:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tubetext/youtube-transcript-fast

You can list several Actors separated by commas. The MCP configurator builds the URL for you if you'd rather click than type.

Why bother? When I asked the server's own search-actors tool for "youtube transcript", it returned ten different Actors with different inputs and prices. With the tool pinned in the URL, Claude skips that step and calls the same Actor every time, with the same input format.

Step 2: add it to Claude as a custom connector

Per Apify's Claude Desktop docs:

1. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors.
2. Click Add → Add custom connector.
3. Name it Apify and paste your URL from step 1 as the Remote MCP server URL.
4. Click Continue, keep the detected settings, then Add.
5. A browser window opens. Sign in to Apify and approve access.

That last step is OAuth, so you never paste an API token into Claude. I checked that the server enforces this: calling the URL above without signing in returns 401 with an OAuth challenge. Remote connectors run on Anthropic's side, so the same connector also works on claude.ai.

Step 3: ask Claude something

Start a new chat and try:

Get the transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw and summarize it in one sentence.

Behind the scenes Claude calls the Actor, which returns a JSON row per video. Here is the real output for that link (YouTube's first ever video), shortened:

{
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channelName": "jawed",
  "durationSeconds": 19,
  "language": "en",
  "source": "captions",
  "wordCount": 39,
  "timestampedText": "[00:01] All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants\n[00:05] the cool thing about these guys is that they have really...\n[00:07] really really long trunks ...",
  "status": "ok"
}

The run took a few seconds and was billed one transcript ($0.004 on the free plan).

Other prompts that work well with this one tool:

• "Pull the transcripts of the last 10 videos on @channel and list the topics they keep coming back to."
• "Here are 5 product review videos. Make a table of the pros and cons each reviewer mentions, with timestamps."
• "Turn this talk into a blog post outline and quote the three strongest lines."

Things worth knowing

• Videos without captions: this Actor transcribes them with Whisper AI by default (billed per minute, capped at 15 minutes per video). Turn that off in the input if you only want caption-based transcripts.
• Long jobs: the MCP call-actor tool waits up to 45 seconds. For a whole channel, Claude gets a run ID back and can fetch the results with get-dataset-items once the run finishes.
• Spend control: you can pass maxTotalChargeUsd as a run option, so a single run can't go over a budget you set.
• Pick tools on purpose: for production use, Apify recommends listing tools explicitly instead of relying on the defaults, so behavior doesn't change when the defaults do.

Same pattern, other data

Swap the Actor name in the URL and Claude gets a different capability. TikTok or Instagram transcripts, Amazon products and Google Flights prices all work the same way. The full list of TubeText tools is on our Apify profile, and Apify Store has thousands more.

If something breaks, open an issue on the Actor's page. I read every one.