niche-finder

YouTube research for creators: find a niche that is growing, see which videos from small channels took off and why, and check your idea before you film it.

Status: the hosted version is coming soon. Accounts with sign-up, tariffs and connecting your own channel are built; the online service is being prepared for its first users. Want early access? Open an issue titled “Early access” or star the repository to follow the launch. Can’t wait? Run your own copy today — it is free and open source.

Contents

• What it does for you
• Why niche-finder
• Screens
• Plans
• Run it yourself today
• For developers
• Privacy and security
• License

What it does for you

Find a niche worth entering

• Where to enter: every niche scored 0–100 from six visible terms — demand trend, supply growth, newcomers breaking out, RPM, templated channels, policy signals — with a side-by-side comparison of 2–3 niches.
• Viral videos from small channels and outlier channels: a video against its own channel’s median, over any period from 24 hours to 90 days, with subscriber, length, Shorts, RPM and Partner Program filters.
• Niche trend: growing, stable, cooling or saturated, from the last 30 days against the 90 before — supply, demand, new channels and whether newcomers break out.
• What outliers share: what a niche’s breakouts have in common against ordinary videos — a number or “?” in the title, length, tags, weekday and time — by the numbers.
• Language gaps: formats that took off in one language and whether anything like them exists in another.
• Trending categories and keywords, a niche map, the best time to publish, and export of a niche’s videos to CSV.

Plan your next video

• Idea checker: is a topic free, recently covered, proven or a flop in this niche?
• Outlier to brief: one click turns a video that beat its channel into a working brief — hook, title patterns, whether the topic is covered, title candidates and thumbnail references.
• Metadata review and hook score: your draft title, description, tags and first 30 seconds checked against what worked in the niche.
• Content gaps: questions from a niche’s comments that no video answers yet, ranked by demand.
• Content calendar: drafts on a week or month grid with the niche’s best hours and a reminder the day before.

Watch competitors and your own channel

• Channel tracking: growth by window, views per hour of every upload, a revenue range, Partner Program thresholds and the next milestones.
• Alerts: a new outlier, accelerating views, a title or thumbnail swap, a channel breaking its silence, a new video on a topic you named — on the dashboard, in the browser extension, in Telegram or as a morning digest.
• Repackaging and template risk: title and thumbnail swaps with views before and after; how much a channel’s uploads look like one template repeated.
• Collaboration partners and sponsors: similar channels of your size, and which brands pay creators in a niche.
• Your own channels: connect them read-only through Google and see your real views, retention, revenue and RPM next to the niche; a net profit calculator with your own costs.

Wherever you work

• A web dashboard with 27 sections plus niche, channel and brief pages.
• A Chrome extension that puts the numbers on top of YouTube itself.
• Claude Desktop or any MCP client: 100 tools and 7 ready-made scenarios, so you can ask for a niche in plain words.

Why niche-finder

• History the API doesn’t give you. YouTube only ever says “how many views right now”. niche-finder writes the numbers down on a schedule, so views per hour, acceleration, subscriber growth and title swaps exist.
• Honest numbers. RPM and revenue come as a range, never one invented figure; every estimate is labelled as niche-finder’s, not YouTube’s; below a minimum sample you get “not enough data” instead of a guess; there is no opaque “SEO score”.
• Answers, not dashboards for their own sake. Every screen ends in a decision: enter this niche or not, film this idea or not, copy this format or not.
• The same numbers everywhere. The dashboard, the extension and Claude call the same calculations, so they can never disagree.

Screens

Every screen is described in frontend/README.md.

Plans

The hosted service will have a free tier and paid tiers. A tier sets how much you can do per day (YouTube lookups, searches, AI features), how many channels you can track and connect, and which features are on — for example your own channel’s revenue, the browser extension and MCP, alerts, export. Prices will be announced at launch; until then, early-access users get the free tier.

The tariff system is already built: an admin defines tiers on the dashboard, and users switch between free tiers themselves. See backend/README.md.

Run it yourself today

niche-finder is open source. With Docker and a free YouTube API key you can run your own copy in a few minutes — the dashboard, the background worker, the extension and the MCP server for Claude Desktop:

git clone https://github.com/pandich93/youtube-niche-finder.git
cd youtube-niche-finder
cp .env.example .env          # put your key into YOUTUBE_API_KEY
docker compose build && make up
# then open http://localhost:8080 in your browser

The full guide — Claude Desktop, the extension, running without Docker, how it works, giving accounts to other people — is in docs/self-hosting.md.

For developers

Bug reports, fixes and documentation PRs are welcome. For anything bigger — a new MCP tool, API route or dashboard screen — please open an issue first. CONTRIBUTING.md explains the dev setup and the tests (make local-test, no YouTube key needed).

Privacy and security

• Read-only. niche-finder never uploads, comments or changes anything on YouTube. Connecting your channel asks Google for read-only access, and revenue is a separate permission you can skip.
• Your channel, your choice. Disconnecting a channel revokes the access at Google and deletes its data.
• No selling, no ads, no sharing of your data.
• Secrets stay secret. Refresh tokens are encrypted; API keys never appear in URLs or logs.

PRIVACY.md lists exactly what is stored and where traffic goes; SECURITY.md covers reporting a problem and what protects each mode.

License

MIT. niche-finder is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. It uses the YouTube API Services under YouTube’s API Terms of Service.