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 (10 hours for anything pasted as a URL, about 50 minutes for uploaded files, which are bounded by upload size rather than duration) 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.