Video downloader alternatives

The big one was October 14, 2025. The IFPI, the recorded-music industry's trade body, shut down y2mate.com and eleven other stream-ripping sites through an enforcement action in Vietnam, where the operator was based. Those sites had pulled in more than 620 million visits in the year before, and the domains are now held by the music industry. Sites in this business tend to have short lives, which is the argument for keeping the job on your own machine.

Treat them carefully. A free site has to pay its bills with advertising, and the aggressive kind pays best: fake download buttons, pop-ups, redirects, and prompts begging to send you notifications. AVG and Malwarebytes both flagged the original y2mate for adware while it was still running. The clones that borrow a dead site's name tend to be worse, since they have no reputation to protect.

A website has to fetch your link on its own server, so a stranger's machine sees every URL you paste. An app does the work locally, so nothing leaves your computer. There's also the money: a free site has to earn back what it costs to run, and that's where the ads come from. You buy Vidferry once, so it has nothing left to sell you. It also keeps working when the next site goes offline.

It's $12 once, for both Mac and Windows, with no subscription and no trial that quietly turns into a charge. That's the point rather than a catch: because you paid for it, there are no ads to run and no reason to harvest your links. If free is a hard requirement, the roundup of the best video downloaders on our blog covers the honest free options.