Give your Dify workflows TikTok Shop, AliExpress and video transcript tools

Disclosure: I build TubeText and wrote this Dify plugin. It's free and open source. The tools bill per result to your own Apify account.

Dify is great at the LLM part of a workflow. The hard part is getting real data in: a product's sales and stock, AliExpress prices, or what a video actually says. The TubeText plugin adds four tools to Dify for exactly that. Each one runs an Apify Actor with your own token and returns clean JSON.

The four tools

Setup (2 minutes)

1. Create a free Apify account and copy your API token from Console → Settings → API & Integrations.
2. In Dify, install TubeText from the Marketplace.
3. Open Tools → TubeText → Authorize and paste the token. A wrong token is rejected right there with a clear message, so you'll know immediately.

Workflow example: "what's the hook?" for any video

The simplest useful workflow has three nodes:

1. Start: one input, video_url.
2. TubeText → Video Transcript: map video_url into Links.
3. LLM: prompt it with the tool's text output, e.g. "Here is a short-form video transcript. Quote the hook (first sentence), name the selling points, and suggest a stronger hook."

The tool returns text (all transcripts joined, ready for the LLM node) plus json, which holds the items, the count, and each Apify run's ID and URL.

In my test, one call with one YouTube link and one TikTok link took 26 seconds. The plugin splits the links between the YouTube and TikTok Actors and runs both in parallel.

Workflow example: AliExpress price check by market

Add AliExpress Search with a keyword, a ship-to country and a currency. I tested Germany / EUR, sorted by orders, 3 results. You get one row per product with the price in that currency, items sold, rating and where it ships from. Feed that into an LLM node to write a short "price range and best seller" summary, or into a code node to flag products under a target price.

A detail that matters for price research: AliExpress shows big new-shopper discounts that most buyers never get. The tool flags these deals and sponsored results, and can skip them.

In an agent

Enable the TubeText tools in an agent app. Each tool has a description that tells the model when to use it. Prompts it's built for:

• "Get the transcript of this TikTok and tell me what the hook is: [link]"
• "Find yoga mats on AliExpress between $5 and $20, sorted by orders"
• "How many units has this TikTok Shop product sold, and which variant has the most stock? [link]"

(I tested the tools in workflows on a self-hosted Dify. I haven't run agent mode with a model yet, so tell me if a prompt misfires.)

Long runs don't block your workflow

Each call waits up to Max Wait seconds (240 by default). If a run takes longer, say a whole YouTube channel, it keeps running on Apify, and the tool returns the run ID right away. Later, a Get Run Results node fetches the rows, with offset and limit for paging. I tested this with Max Wait set to 3 seconds: the tool returned RUNNING plus the run ID, and Get Run Results returned the finished data afterwards.

What it costs

The plugin is free. These are Apify Free-plan USD rates checked on 23 October 2026, not an all-in workflow quote. Dify/model-provider usage is separate.

Choose the commerce path before estimating the bill:

• A US TikTok Shop stock review: TikTok Shop pricing is $4 per 1,000 products with full details. Store/category listing cards are $1.50 per 1,000 when Include Details is off, but those cards do not include per-SKU stock. For a per-variant review, keep details on and choose Full output: the plugin's Simplified field list retains total stock, not the SKU array.
• An AliExpress price shortlist: AliExpress pricing is $2.50 per 1,000 search-result products. Start with one keyword, a fixed ship-to country/currency and a small Max Products per Keyword. Set Skip New-Shopper Deals explicitly; turn on Skip Sponsored if you want organic results. The Dify tool exposes search results, not the underlying Actor's separate product-detail mode.

Keep each platform's product ID and source URL. Similar titles or images do not prove that two listings are the same SKU or supplier. Verify the variant, pack size, destination, currency and offer eligibility before comparing. A displayed search price is not a verified checkout total or landed cost; do not treat missing shipping, tax or stock data as zero.

For the video tool, current caption-result rates are YouTube: $4 per 1,000 and TikTok: $1.50 per 1,000. Optional AI transcription is $0.006 per started audio minute at this plan tier; check the selected Actor's billing conditions before enabling it.

Items excluded from a result fee do not make the entire run free. All four underlying Actors currently list an Actor Start fee of $0.00005 per GB of memory, with a one-event minimum, and other applicable charges may apply. TikTok Transcript lists a scheduled startup-rate change to $0.0011 per GB from 4 November 2026, 03:53:50 UTC; check the live Pricing tab before recurring use.

Free-plan credit can cover eligible charges only while credit remains. Check the actual run's usage before increasing volume. A timed-out Dify call can still be running on Apify: keep its run ID and use Get Run Results, rather than starting a duplicate run just to retrieve the same job.

Limits worth knowing

• TikTok Shop needs links or product IDs. It doesn't search by keyword, and it covers the US store only.
• AliExpress returns search-result data, not product-page details or store names.
• The plugin only calls api.apify.com. It never logs in to TikTok, AliExpress or YouTube.

Source: github.com/LMSlay/dify-plugin-tubetext. Issues and ideas are welcome there.