Translation API pricing is confusing on purpose. Some charge per character, some per word, some per request. Some have free tiers that look generous until you hit the limits. Some quote prices that don't include the base subscription fee.
I calculated the actual cost per million characters for every major translation API at three volume levels: 5 million, 25 million, and 100 million characters per month. These are the real numbers, including base fees and accounting for free tier credits.
The comparison table
| API | 5M chars/mo | 25M chars/mo | 100M chars/mo | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Langbly Scale | $19* | $69* | $199 | Context-aware |
| Langbly (per-M rate) | $3.80/M | $2.76/M | $1.99/M | Context-aware |
| Google Translate | $90** | $490** | $1,990** | Neural MT |
| Google (per-M rate) | $20/M | $20/M | $20/M | Neural MT |
| DeepL Pro | $117.98*** | $617.98*** | $2,506*** | Neural MT |
| DeepL (per-M rate) | $23.60/M | $24.72/M | $25.06/M | Neural MT |
| Amazon Translate | $75 | $375 | $1,500 | Neural MT |
| Amazon (per-M rate) | $15/M | $15/M | $15/M | Neural MT |
| Azure Translator | $50 | $250 | $1,000 | Neural MT |
| Azure (per-M rate) | $10/M | $10/M | $10/M | Neural MT |
| MyMemory | Free**** | N/A | N/A | Mixed |
| LibreTranslate | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) | Basic MT |
* Langbly includes the volume in the plan price. Starter ($19/mo) = 5M chars, Growth ($69/mo) = 25M chars, Scale ($199/mo) = 100M chars.
** Google provides 500K free characters per month. Calculated as: (volume - 500K) * $20/M.
*** DeepL Pro has a $5.49/mo base fee plus $25/M characters. Some volume discounts apply at scale.
**** MyMemory free tier: 5,000 characters per day (~150K/month). Paid plans available.
Breaking it down
Cheapest at 5M characters/month
At 5 million characters per month (typical for a SaaS app supporting 3-5 languages), the ranking is:
- Langbly: $19/month (Starter plan). Flat rate, no per-character billing.
- Azure Translator: $50/month at $10/M.
- Amazon Translate: $75/month at $15/M.
- Google Translate: $90/month (after 500K free credit).
- DeepL Pro: ~$118/month ($5.49 base + $25/M for 4.5M chars).
At this volume, Langbly costs 62% less than the next cheapest option (Azure) and 79% less than Google Translate.
Cheapest at 25M characters/month
At 25 million characters per month (typical for a product localized into 10+ languages with regular updates):
- Langbly: $69/month (Growth plan).
- Azure Translator: $250/month.
- Amazon Translate: $375/month.
- Google Translate: $490/month.
- DeepL Pro: ~$618/month.
The gap widens at higher volumes. Langbly is 72% cheaper than Azure and 86% cheaper than Google Translate.
Cheapest at 100M characters/month
At 100 million characters per month (large-scale localization, content platforms, or translation service providers):
- Langbly: $199/month (Scale plan).
- Azure Translator: $1,000/month.
- Amazon Translate: $1,500/month.
- Google Translate: $1,990/month.
- DeepL Pro: ~$2,506/month.
At this volume, Langbly is 80% cheaper than Azure and 90% cheaper than Google. That's a $1,800/month saving compared to Google Translate alone.
The "free" options
Google Translate free tier
Google gives you 500,000 characters per month free. That sounds like a lot, but it's roughly 100 pages of text. If you're translating a website or app into multiple languages, you'll blow through it in the first week. After the free tier, you're paying $20 per million characters with no volume discounts. See the full Google Translate API pricing breakdown for details.
DeepL free tier
DeepL's free API plan offers 500,000 characters per month with no cost. The limitations: rate-limited, fewer languages (33 vs. 33 on Pro too, but some features are restricted), and you can't use it for production workloads according to their terms. DeepL Pro starts at $5.49/month plus $25 per million characters. The base fee is small, but the per-character rate is the highest of the major providers. Details in our DeepL API pricing guide.
MyMemory
MyMemory offers 5,000 characters per day for free (roughly 150,000 per month). Quality is mixed because it blends machine translation with crowd-sourced translation memories. Fine for testing. Not reliable for production. No SLA, no guarantees on uptime or quality consistency.
LibreTranslate
LibreTranslate is open-source and free to self-host. The catch: you need to run your own server. That means server costs ($20-50/month for a basic instance), maintenance, updates, and dealing with performance tuning. Translation quality is noticeably below Google, DeepL, and Langbly. It uses the Argos Translate engine, which handles common language pairs adequately but struggles with less common ones.
Hidden costs to watch for
The per-character price isn't the whole story. Other costs that affect your total spend:
- Character counting differences: Google counts spaces and punctuation. So does DeepL. A 1,000-character paragraph might be counted as 1,200 characters including spaces. This inflates your bill by 15-20%. Langbly counts the same way (it's part of the Google Translate v2 compatibility), but the lower per-character rate absorbs the impact.
- HTML markup: If you send HTML to translate, the tags count as characters on most APIs. A paragraph with formatting can be 40% markup. Google doesn't charge for HTML tags if you specify the "html" format, but not all providers offer this.
- Retranslation: Cheap translation that requires heavy human editing costs more in total than better translation that needs light review. The per-character cost of the API is one input. The cost of human review per string is the other. Lower-quality engines save on API costs but increase review costs.
- GCP/AWS account overhead: Using Google Translate or Amazon Translate means setting up and maintaining a cloud provider account. That's not technically a translation cost, but it adds complexity and time.
What about quality?
Cheapest isn't always best. The cheapest translation that requires 50% editing by a human costs more in total than a slightly more expensive translation that requires 10% editing.
At the quality tiers:
- Basic (LibreTranslate, MyMemory): Understandable but often awkward. Fine for getting the gist of text. Not suitable for production software UI or customer-facing content.
- Standard (Google, Amazon, Azure): Reliable for most content. Good grammar, decent vocabulary. Struggles with context-dependent translations and domain-specific terminology.
- Advanced (DeepL, Langbly): Better handling of context, more natural phrasing, fewer errors in complex sentences. DeepL is particularly strong for European languages. Langbly's context-aware approach handles technical content and placeholder-heavy strings well.
For production use, I'd exclude the basic tier entirely. The standard tier works if you have human reviewers. The advanced tier works with lighter review or, for internal content, without review.
Switching costs
One thing that keeps teams on expensive APIs: the perceived cost of switching. If you've built your integration around the Google Translate v2 API, switching to a different API means rewriting your translation code, right?
Not necessarily. Langbly is specifically designed as a Google Translate v2 drop-in replacement. Same endpoint structure, same request/response format. Change the API URL and key, keep everything else. Your existing integration code, your TMS integration, your CI/CD pipeline: all unchanged.
If you're on Amazon Translate or Azure, switching requires some code changes since they use different API formats. But the actual translation call is usually a single function in your codebase. The migration is hours, not weeks.
Recommendations by use case
Hobby project or prototype: Google Translate free tier (500K chars/month) or DeepL free tier. Both are adequate for testing and low-volume use.
SaaS app, 2-5 languages: Langbly Starter ($19/month for 5M characters). Cheapest paid option by far, with quality on par with or better than Google Translate.
Growing product, 5-15 languages: Langbly Growth ($69/month for 25M characters). At this volume, Google would cost $490/month and DeepL $618/month.
Large-scale localization: Langbly Scale ($199/month for 100M characters) or Azure Translator ($1,000/month for 100M) if you're locked into the Microsoft ecosystem.
Self-hosted, maximum control: LibreTranslate if you can accept lower quality and handle infrastructure. Budget $30-50/month for server costs plus your time maintaining it.
For a broader comparison including feature details, see our translation API pricing comparison.