Why TikTok has no subtitle file to give you
Auto-captions on TikTok are a display feature, not a data feature. They are composited into the video image during playback and export, so what reaches your screen is a picture of words. There is no sidecar file, no caption track and no API surface that exposes them, which is the same reason you cannot copy a caption by selecting it. Regenerating the text from the audio is the only route, and it is what happens here.
What you get back
Three downloads from the same conversion. The .md is the readable transcript with punctuation and paragraphs. The .srt is standard SubRip: numbered cues, times in HH:MM:SS,mmm with a comma before the milliseconds, a blank line between cues. The .vtt is WebVTT: a WEBVTT header line and times with a dot before the milliseconds, which is the format browsers want for the HTML5 track element. Pick SRT for editors and upload forms, VTT for the web.
The one thing to check before shipping
Cue boundaries follow speech, not subtitle conventions. The segmentation comes from natural pauses in the audio, so a fast-talking creator who does not breathe for eleven seconds produces one long cue rather than the two-line, roughly 42 character blocks that broadcast style guides ask for. For social captions this is usually fine. For anything held to a caption standard, open the .srt in a subtitle editor and split the long cues before publishing.
Where the file goes next: YouTube Studio accepts an .srt upload on a Short or a regular video, Vimeo takes both formats, and Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and CapCut all import SRT as an editable caption track. Same export exists for long-form via Video to Markdown and YouTube to Markdown. Start at TikTok Transcript, and see how to transcribe a TikTok video for the full walkthrough.