TL;DR

New videos come from YouTube's channel RSS feeds, which cost no quota. The Data API fills in what RSS can't tell me (video length to drop Shorts, live status, channel avatars, comments) and stands in when a feed fails.

Everything the API returns is cached per channel and shared by all users, so keeping feeds fresh costs in proportion to distinct channels and new uploads , not users.

Last 7 days: 701 units, about 100 a day, or 1% of the quota. That's pre-launch, with one real user (me) and 40 channels. The biggest line item was not what I expected.

I'm building Plainfeed, a website that shows new videos from the YouTube channels you pick, in the order they were posted, without recommendations or Shorts. I'm building it alone, and it runs on Cloudflare's free plan.

The first wall you hit with anything like this is the YouTube Data API quota: 10,000 units per project per day, with no paid tier. The only way up is an audit.…