Hi, there's a human here.

ReplyTide is a one-person product. I design it, build it, test it, and answer the support emails. This page exists so you know there's an actual human behind the tool you're connecting your YouTube channel to — which feels like the least a tool asking for OAuth access owes you.

Why this exists

Creators often announce a resource and invite viewers to request the link with a keyword. The resource should still be independently available from the video description or pinned comment; a requested reply is a convenience, not the price of access.

ReplyTide grew from a simple idea: publish one clear resource page, automate only explicit requests, make delivery email optional and purpose-limited, and keep an optional creator-channel link until after access is available.

Where the policy stance comes from

The rules this tool refuses to bend are not my own invention, and they are not a marketing position. They come from two documents that are worth reading if you automate anything on YouTube: the YouTube API Services Terms of Service, and YouTube's spam, deceptive practices and scams policy.

Read together they draw a line that is narrower than most creators expect. Replying from a channel's own authorized account, at a sane rate, to viewers who used a keyword the channel announced, is ordinary creator behaviour. Automating engagement itself — verifying subscriptions, gating a resource behind a like, driving a logged-in session with a browser bot, or sending replies nobody asked for — is where channels get actioned. The difference is not volume. It is whether the viewer asked.

That is why the architecture looks the way it does. Every action runs through the official Data API under Google's OAuth consent, which means YouTube can see exactly what the tool does on a channel's behalf and a creator can revoke it in one click from their Google account. A scraper cannot offer either of those things, which is the real reason not to build one.

The principles it's built on

• Official API only. Everything runs through the YouTube Data API with Google's OAuth consent. No browser bots, no scraping, no fake sessions. You can revoke access from your Google account at any time.
• No engagement gates. Resource access never depends on subscribing, liking, commenting, or claiming to have done so. A creator-channel link may appear only after access is already available.
• Your data is yours. Export your leads anytime. Delete your account and everything goes with it, including our access to your Google account. OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest.
• Anti-spam by default. One explicit resource request produces one useful reply. Automation should compress requested work, not manufacture engagement.

What I will not build

It is easier to trust a tool when you know what it refuses to do, so: no subscriber verification, no engagement gating, no browser automation that drives a logged-in session, and no reselling or enriching the delivery addresses creators collect. Several of those would be straightforward to add and some are actively requested. They are not on the roadmap, because each one is the thing that gets a channel actioned or a viewer's trust spent.

If a competitor offers one of them as a feature, that is not an oversight on my part.

What actually exists today

ReplyTide is a working product rather than a landing page with a waitlist, so it is fair to ask what that amounts to.

• Google has verified the app. ReplyTide completed Google's OAuth application verification, including the security review that sensitive YouTube scopes require. That is the step most side projects never finish, and it is why the consent screen shows a verified app rather than an unverified-app warning.
• Three free tools, no account needed. A comment exporter, a giveaway picker that publishes a verifiable draw seed, and a comment search. They run without signing in because they are useful on their own, not because they are a funnel.
• Three plans, with the limits written down. Base at $9, Creator at $19, Pro at $49 per month, and the campaign, reply and lead limits for each are stated on the pricing page rather than left to a sales call.
• Japanese and Korean, properly. Not machine-translated menus over English pages — localized guides, legal disclosures written for each jurisdiction, and separate indexes at 日本語 and 한국어.
• It is operated, not just deployed. Encrypted credentials at rest, automated database backups, an independent watchdog that alerts me when the site stops answering, and a preflight that refuses to ship a release carrying secrets or stray runtime files.

None of that is remarkable engineering. It is the boring half of running a tool that holds an OAuth grant to someone's channel, and it is the half that tends to be skipped.

Get in touch

Questions, bug reports, or feature ideas? I read everything, and there is no support queue between you and me. Email support@replytide.co — the same address on the security contact and in the app.

The code I write is public where it can be: github.com/vishalarora22. I post about building this at x.com/arovishal.