You do not have to download a video before you analyse it. Paste the page URL and the file is fetched server-side, then treated exactly like an upload: cut into segments, transcribed, captioned, and left as a searchable index you can pull clips out of. The link route is convenient rather than free — it is metered and billed identically to an upload, and it accepts a fixed list of platforms and nothing else.
A YouTube watch page is a web page, not a video file, so the import runs it through yt-dlp rather than fetching it directly. The list of hosts that reach that route is a fixed allow-list — it is a security boundary, not a convenience, because the fetcher follows whatever the page points at and must only ever do that against known public platforms. Anything not on the list is refused rather than attempted.
| Platform | Hosts accepted |
|---|---|
| YouTube | youtube.com, youtu.be, youtube-nocookie.com |
| TikTok | tiktok.com |
| instagram.com | |
| facebook.com, fb.watch | |
| X / Twitter | x.com, twitter.com |
| Vimeo | vimeo.com |
| Dailymotion | dailymotion.com, dai.ly |
| Twitch | twitch.tv |
| reddit.com, v.redd.it | |
| Streamable | streamable.com |
| Rumble | rumble.com |
| Bilibili | bilibili.com |
Subdomains count, so a regional or mobile host on one of those domains resolves too. A direct link to a video file on any other host still works through the ordinary upload route — it is only platform pages that need this lane.
Paste the ordinary link, the one from the address bar or the share sheet. Short-link forms are handled: youtu.be, fb.watch, dai.ly and v.redd.it all resolve. What is not handled is a playlist — the import deliberately takes one video and ignores the rest — so link the specific video rather than the collection it sits in.
Which plan: Starter and up. The Analyze section shows a plan pitch below Starter, and every part of the pass is billed in ✦ gold credits, which a free account has none of.
This is the number people get wrong. There is a route ceiling of several gigabytes, but almost nobody meets it, because the real cap is your plan's per-file upload allowance — 90% of your storage quota — and it applies to a link import exactly as it applies to a file you drag in. That is deliberate: one function computes the cap and both routes call it, so a link cannot smuggle in a file an upload would have refused.
| Plan | Storage | Per-file cap |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 50 MB | about 45 MB |
| Starter | 250 MB | about 225 MB |
| Creator | 2 GB | about 1.8 GB |
| Pro | 10 GB | about 9 GB, clamped by the route ceiling |
| Ultra | 100 GB | the route ceiling |
Two things make that cap less painful than it looks. Imported files are fetched at up to 1080p rather than the source's maximum, which is more than the captioning and transcription need. And a long video is usually better trimmed before analysis anyway, because the credit cost scales with the frames analysed rather than with the file size.
Open Analyze — Opens the Analyze workspace, where the source field takes a link. Nothing is charged until the pass runs.
The import itself is not the expensive part — the analysis is, and it is billed exactly as it would be for an uploaded file. Two meters move. Credits come out of the gold wallet at roughly ✦0.07 per analysed frame, which works out at about ✦4 per minute of source at default sampling. Separately, a daily allowance measured in minutes of source is charged up front: 10 on Free, 60 on Starter, 120 on Creator, 300 on Pro, 900 on Ultra.
| Source length | Gold, at default sampling | Minutes charged |
|---|---|---|
| 1 minute | about ✦4 | 1 |
| 10 minutes | about ✦42 | 10 |
| 30 minutes | about ✦125 | 30 |
| One moment search afterwards | ✦1 | 2, flat |
Set that against a Starter plan's ✦50 a month and the shape of the feature becomes obvious: the daily minute allowance is not the binding limit on any plan below Ultra — the gold wallet is. Buying credits is what extends Analyze, and buying credits does not change your tier.
Watch out: Importing someone else's video does not give you rights to it. The platforms listed above are accepted as sources for analysis; whether you may publish clips cut from a given video is between you, the uploader and that platform's terms.
Once the file is in and analysed it is an ordinary source with an ordinary index, and everything that works on an upload works on it:
A direct link to a video file works through the ordinary route. Platform pages only work for the twelve platforms listed above, because the fetcher that reads a web page is restricted to known public platforms on purpose.
No. It obeys exactly the same per-file cap, the same daily minute allowance and the same gold credit charge. The only thing it saves is the download to your own machine.
Either the host is not on the accepted list, or the fetched file is larger than your plan's per-file cap — 225 MB on Starter, about 1.8 GB on Creator. Both are checked before anything is charged.
Imports are capped at 1080p. The analysis reads frames at a much smaller working size anyway, and clips exported from the index are cut from the imported file.
No. Analyze needs Starter and is paid in gold credits, which a free account is granted none of.