Rundownly

Why I Built This

I watch a lot of YouTube - conference talks, system design deep dives, interviews, podcasts - and most of it is longer than it needs to be. YouTube's "Ask Gemini" feature produces walls of text with no structure, no timestamps, and no way to scan quickly.

I had previously built a web-based version (yt-video-summariser) as a full-stack Next.js app, but YouTube blocks transcript requests from cloud/datacenter IPs (AWS, GCP, Vercel) with "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" walls. The only workaround was a residential proxy at ~$6/month. And I'm broke af :)

If YouTube blocks server IPs but not home IPs, run the whole thing on the user's machine. That's how Rundownly was born - a desktop app that fetches transcripts directly from your IP, powered by the YouTube Transcript API library I had built earlier. You paste a YouTube URL, pick a summary length and language, and get a structured summary with clickable timestamps. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay for beyond your own API key.

Working Demo

Paste a YouTube URL, pick your preferences, and get a structured summary with clickable timestamps.

Tech Stack

• Tauri 2 - Desktop framework
• Next.js 16 - Frontend framework
• React 19 - UI library
• Rust - Backend (reqwest, tokio)
• Tailwind CSS 4 - Styling
• Claude API (Sonnet 4.6) - AI summarization
• react-markdown - Markdown rendering
• tauri-plugin-store - Local settings storage
• OS Keychain - Secure API key storage

Key Features

• Runs locally - YouTube is accessed from your IP. No server, no IP blocks.
• Secure - API key stored in your OS keychain (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, Linux Secret Service). Never leaves your machine.
• Timestamps - Summaries link back to exact moments in the video.
• 11 languages - English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Assamese.
• 3 summary lengths - Short, Medium, or Long.
• Dark mode - Follows your system theme.
• Caching - Re-opening the same video returns the cached summary instantly (24h TTL).
• Export - Download summaries as Markdown or copy to clipboard.

Why Tauri

I wanted a desktop app with a small footprint. While exploring Tauri and Electron, Tauri was the clear winner. Both the macOS .dmg and the Windows installer come in at ~4MB. A bare Electron app ships at 120MB+, roughly 30x the size. Learning about Tauri and Rust along the way was a bonus.