Behind the Scenes: How SubGrab Protects Your Transcripts and Credits
Encrypted off-site backups, immutable storage, a per-transaction credit ledger, and automatic refunds — a plain-English tour of the reliability work protecting your account.
Most product updates announce visible features. This one is about the invisible kind: the engineering that makes sure your transcripts, credits, and payment history survive bad days — server failures, platform outages, even the messy edge cases of distributed systems. Here's a plain-English tour of what protects your account, updated with work that shipped this month.
Your Data Survives Hardware, Not Just Bugs
Every night, the entire SubGrab database is snapshotted, integrity-checked, and stored in two independent places:
- On-server backups protect against software mistakes — a bad deploy, an accidental deletion — with two weeks of daily history.
- Encrypted off-site backups protect against the worst case: the physical server disappearing entirely. Copies live in a separate cloud storage provider, encrypted at rest, in a different failure domain from the server itself.
The off-site copies use immutable storage: once written, a backup physically cannot be modified or deleted for 21 days — not even by our own systems. If an attacker somehow compromised the server, they still couldn't touch the backup history. And a separate independent monitor checks every day that fresh backups actually exist, because a backup system that fails silently is worse than none.
Every Credit Movement Is Now on a Ledger
Credits are money, and money deserves bookkeeping. As of this week, every single credit movement — signup bonus, purchase, transcription, summary, refund — writes a permanent entry to an append-only ledger, recorded in the same database transaction as the balance change itself.
What that means in practice:
- "Why is my balance 7?" has an exact answer. Support can trace every credit from the moment it was granted to the moment it was spent or refunded.
- Double-charging is structurally impossible for one-shot events: a purchase or bonus carries a unique fingerprint, and the database itself rejects any attempt to apply it twice — no matter what bug might try.
- The books are checkable. An automated reconciliation compares the ledger against every account balance and flags any drift immediately.
Payments: Verified Twice, Trusted Once
When you buy credits, the fulfillment doesn't take anyone's word for the amount — not even its own checkout metadata. The webhook independently verifies the payment status, the amount paid, and the currency against the server's own price catalog before a single credit is granted. Card details never touch SubGrab's servers at all; they live with Stripe, the payment processor used across much of the internet. Read more about how the 1-click repurchase flow keeps you in control of your saved card.
Failures Refund Themselves
Transcription depends on external platforms, and platforms have bad days. The rule is simple: if you don't get a transcript, you don't pay.
- Failed AI transcriptions refund automatically — now with a ledger entry documenting the refund.
- Costs are confirmed before work starts: if a video turns out longer than quoted, you're asked to confirm the real price rather than being silently charged more.
- Over-limit content (4 hours for regular videos and uploads, 2 for livestream VODs) is rejected upfront, before any credit is spent.
Capacity Is Managed, Not Hoped About
Transcription is heavy work — downloads, audio processing, AI inference. SubGrab now enforces explicit capacity limits so a burst of simultaneous jobs degrades into a polite "try again in a minute" instead of slow, failing transcriptions for everyone. Combined with continuous monitoring of per-platform success rates and a tested-before-promotion pipeline for extractor updates, the goal is boring reliability.
What This Means for You
Nothing changes in how you use SubGrab — that's the point. Transcripts keep landing in seconds, credits keep working the same way, and the value guide still applies. The difference is what's underneath: your history, balance, and payments are now protected by layered, verified, independently-monitored systems rather than good intentions.
Questions about your account or credit history? The dashboard shows your balance and transcripts, and every email we send includes a way to reach us.