FreeSubtitles.AI

What FreeSubtitles.AI is

FreeSubtitles, now running as Subtitles.app, is a transcription, translation and subtitling service that turns video and audio into text and captions you can edit and export.

It is aimed at the routine captioning workflow rather than at anything specialist, and the transparency of its pricing is unusual for the category.

Transcribing, translating and exporting subtitles

It converts common video and audio formats into text with automatic language detection across roughly a hundred file languages, and translates into a comparable range with switchable subtitle tracks. Export covers the standard subtitle and text formats, and a built-in player and editor let you fix timing before publishing.

A URL importer pulls media from a large number of supported sites, which removes the step of downloading something before captioning it.

The free tier covers files of moderate length and size with a small daily upload allowance, and the paid tier removes the caps, improves accuracy, adds speaker labels, supports batch processing and opens the developer interface.

Who it is for

It suits creators, educators and localisation teams needing quick captions, translated subtitles or searchable transcripts.

It also suits anyone captioning media from a wide range of sources rather than from one platform.

What to keep in mind

The pricing model is honest and worth understanding: the paid tier is charged per hour of processed media with no subscription, so cost scales with the length of your library rather than with the calendar. That is transparent and does mean a long back catalogue adds up, so estimate before starting.

Read the retention terms. Free-tier media and transcripts are deleted shortly after processing while paid accounts keep media for a period and transcripts until deleted, which is a reasonable arrangement and a difference worth knowing when you cannot download immediately.

Human-review the output before publishing. Speaker labels and translations can err, and a subtitle file is visible to every viewer of the finished piece.

Check that you have permission for imported media. Captioning from another site does not by itself give you the right to republish it.

One habit worth forming is to export the subtitle file as soon as it is generated, since retention terms differ between the free and paid tiers and a file you intended to download is a file you may no longer have. It is also worth reading the first two minutes of any imported media before captioning it, because automatic language detection occasionally lands on the wrong language for short clips and the resulting file is not obviously wrong until you read it. Neither habit takes long, and both prevent mistakes that only appear after publication.

It is also worth deciding whether you will need the developer interface or only the web application, because that answer changes which tier makes sense and whether per-hour pricing suits you at all. Programmatic use is charged the same way, so an automated pipeline processing a large archive is priced like a large archive rather than like a small subscription. Running the numbers on your actual volume is a five-minute exercise.