About FreeTheVideo — Watch Videos Without Tracking

I built this because my wife sends me a lot of social media videos and I hate social media.

FreeTheVideo is a free, private video viewer and video proxy for social media. Paste a link from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X/Twitter, or Facebook, and watch the video right here — no tracking, no ads, no cookies, no account needed. Every video that gets downloaded is cached and available to everyone for free.

How It Works

Paste a link from any supported platform. We extract the video using yt-dlp, strip all tracking, and cache it on our servers.

Watch privately. No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels. The video plays from our server, not the original platform. They never know you watched it.

Cached for everyone. Once a video is downloaded, it's free and instant for the next person who wants to watch it. Short videos are always free. Longer videos and extra features cost a few cents — pay instantly with Cash App, Strike, or any Lightning wallet.

Community Unlocks

Pay once, unlock for all.

When you pay to transcribe a video, generate a podcast, or download a longer video, the result is cached and becomes free for everyone after you. You're not paying for just yourself — you're unlocking it for the next hundred people.

The more people use FreeTheVideo, the more content is already unlocked when you arrive. It's a community-funded content library that grows with every user.

What's free vs. paid

Video downloads: Free for videos under 8 minutes (20/day). Longer videos require a Lightning payment (100-500 sats depending on length).
Transcription: Free for videos under 5 minutes (1/day). Longer videos cost 200-500 sats.
AI Podcasts: Free for short articles (1/day). Longer content and custom tones cost 300-1000 sats.
TL;DR summaries: Free after transcription. If the video is already transcribed, the summary is instant and free.

Once any of these is paid for by anyone, it's permanently cached and free for all future visitors.

Pay with Cash App — open Cash App, tap Bitcoin, hit Send, and scan the QR code. Also works with Strike, Phoenix, or any Lightning wallet. It's instant and usually costs less than $0.50.

AI Features

Transcription

Any video can be transcribed using AI (Google Gemini via OpenRouter). The audio is extracted, sent to the AI model, and you get back a timestamped transcript. Transcripts are cached permanently and available to everyone.

TL;DR Summaries

One-click AI summaries of any video. The system transcribes the video first (if not already done), then generates a concise summary with key points. Available on every watch page and from the homepage.

Article-to-Podcast

Paste article URLs and AI reads them, writes a multi-speaker discussion script (like real podcast hosts having a conversation about what they read), and generates voice audio. You can also write your own script using speaker tags. Choose from 2-4 speakers, customize the tone (funny, serious, debate, etc.), and download the MP3.

Privacy

The entire point of this service is privacy. We collect almost nothing:

No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no ads
No user accounts or registration required
IP addresses used only for rate limiting, never stored permanently
Lightning payments are pseudonymous — we see payment hashes, not identities
Cached videos auto-delete after 30 days

Read the full Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.