Creators needs an account and credits. It runs on the hosted vfrey service, which is not live yet. Free features do not need it.
Creators finds the accounts that matter in a niche and shows what they do: how often they post, how much of their audience engages, which formats and hooks work for them, and their top posts. It uses providers and the official YouTube API. vfrey does not scrape. The index fills as Topics collects a niche, and the server tops it up when a niche has few creators. Search reads that index.

Find creators for a topic

creators find is a preset of Ingest: one sweep of searches that returns many distinct creators for a topic in a country, ranked, each with followers, views, engagement and a link to every relevant video. It fixes the usual trouble with searching a platform by hand: the same creator over and over, foreign clips, no numbers, too few accounts.
It shows the cost first: three searches of two pages is 6 provider calls, up to 6 credits. Add --quote to see the cost and stop. Over 10 credits it runs only with --max-credits. --region VN keeps posts from Vietnam, --must-mention muji keeps captions that mention MUJI, and --any-of (with --price for a price or a discount like 99k) keeps the ones about a sale. Accents do not matter. The answer is one row per creator with followers, tier, matching videos, median views, engagement, views per follower, average shares and saves, latest post, cities and a score, plus the best video’s link; brand accounts, retailers and probably-not-creators are listed apart. --language vi keeps captions written in Vietnamese. --out DIR writes summary.md (read it instead of running again), posts.csv (every video with its link), groups.csv (one row per creator), result.json and report.html. It works in any folder, with no project. Ingest explains every metric, the cost and the limits.

Commands

Every command takes --json (not export, which prints CSV) and --api URL. A number the provider did not return is shown as a dash, never as a zero. Engagement, posts per week, and follower growth each say what they were measured over. Watched creators are refreshed daily. Other creators are refreshed only when someone opens them and their data is more than 7 days old. You can have up to 20 watchlists, with up to 500 creators each.

Study formats

On the Creators screen of the dashboard, open a creator and press Study formats. vfrey writes research/HANDLE.md in your project. It lists the creator’s formats, their hooks (the first sentence of their top captions), and their top posts. Your agent reads it before it designs a scene. This is for learning what works: the shape of the video, how it opens, how long it runs. The file tells the agent to write its own script and visuals, and not to copy the creator’s videos, captions, or footage. Study formats needs a project. Outside one, the screen says so. The Creators screen also has the search filters, a results table, the profile view, and the watchlists.

Privacy and opt-out

Creator profiles are personal data, so vfrey keeps little of it.
  • It keeps public profile fields and public metrics only. It keeps an email or link as a business contact only when the creator’s bio presents it as one (such as “business:” or “collab”). It never keeps a phone number.
  • A creator can ask to be removed. The vfrey site has a public opt-out page, /creators/opt-out, that takes the platform, the handle, and an email to confirm from. vfrey emails a confirmation link to that address. Once the creator confirms it, the stored data is deleted and future collection is blocked.
  • A creator that nobody watches is deleted after 90 days without being viewed. A YouTube creator that nobody watches is deleted 30 days after its last refresh, as the YouTube API Services policies require.
  • There is no bulk export beyond a watchlist, and the export is rate-limited.
  • The console publishes the full creator data notice at /creators/privacy on the same host as the opt-out page. Its terms, privacy policy, refund policy, acceptable use policy, data processing addendum, subprocessor list and cookie notice are at /terms, /privacy, /refunds, /acceptable-use, /dpa, /subprocessors and /cookies. The free tool’s terms and privacy pages are on the vfrey site.
See Plans and credits for limits and what happens when credits run out.