Headwater

About Headwater

Updated 23 September 2026

Headwater summarizes the YouTube channels you follow into one morning email digest, readable in the app or on an e-ink reader. Read the gist, watch what's worth it.

What Headwater is

Headwater is a YouTube channel summarizer built around subscriptions rather than single videos. You follow channels by handle or URL. Headwater watches their public feeds, reads each new video, and writes a summary in its own words: what the video covers, the strongest quotes with timestamps, and a note when the title promises more than the video delivers. Every morning, at the hour you choose, one email lists what your channels published in the last day.

The summaries are also readable in the app, and can be synced to an e-ink reader as a daily issue.

Who it is for

People who follow a handful of creators and want to keep up with them without opening YouTube's feed. The digest is a triage tool. It tells you what each video argued so you can decide which ones deserve your time, and it links to every video it describes.

It is not a tool for summarizing whatever video you happen to be watching. Browser extensions do that well. Headwater has a paste-a-link summarizer, but the product is the subscription and the morning email.

How it works

  1. Follow channels. Add any public YouTube channel by @handle or URL. No Google account and no YouTube login are needed; Headwater reads each channel's public RSS feed.
  2. New videos are read. Several times a day Headwater checks the feeds, fetches the transcript of each new video, and asks a large language model (Claude, by Anthropic) to distil it. Each video is summarized once, however many people follow the channel.
  3. The digest is written. Each summary states the video's central claim in a sentence, lists the topics covered with timestamps, quotes the lines worth hearing, and flags when a title oversells its content. Videos are ordered by the priority you give your channels.
  4. One email a morning. Delivered at the hour you pick, in your timezone. Nothing else is ever sent except account mail you asked for.
  5. Optionally, an e-reader. Your account can publish an OPDS catalog. An e-ink reader that supports OPDS pulls each day's issue as an EPUB.

What Headwater deliberately does not do

  • No feed, no recommendations, no autoplay. Headwater only ever shows you channels you chose. The name means what it says: it sits upstream of the algorithm.
  • No tracking pixel and no third-party analytics. Headwater records a small set of first-party, cookieless events and nothing else. Digest emails carry no open tracking.
  • No transcript storage. Transcripts are used to write a summary and then discarded. Only the summary is kept.
  • No replacement for the video. Summaries are written in Headwater's own words, quote sparingly with attribution, and link back to the original. They exist to help you decide what to watch. A creator who would rather not be summarized can email [email protected] and the channel is removed.

E-readers

Headwater publishes a per-account OPDS catalog, the standard e-book catalog format that reader apps and devices can subscribe to. The catalog holds a rolling two-week window of daily issues plus any collections you push from the app with Send to device. Each issue is a plain EPUB grouped by channel.

For the Xteink X3 and X4, Headwater Edition is free, MIT-licensed firmware that turns the reader into a one-button Headwater device. It is a fork of the CrossPoint firmware. See the Headwater Edition page for the flashing steps.

Pricing

Headwater is free while in beta. No card is required to create an account.

Who makes it

Headwater is built and run by one independent developer. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google. Questions go to [email protected].

The name

A headwater is the source of a river, the place upstream of everything that later joins it. Headwater's tagline, "upstream of the algorithm", means the same thing: you decide which channels matter before any recommendation system gets a vote.