Translation Cost Calculator
Estimate what it costs to translate your site with DeepL, Google, or OpenAI — and compare it to per-word SaaS pricing.
Estimated cost to translate everything once
Estimates only, and not Gloty pricing — these are what the providers charge if you go to them directly. Gloty offers monthly subscriptions and one-time character allowances; see plans. Assumes ~6 characters per word and approximate 2026 provider list prices; LLM cost assumes GPT-4o mini. Verify current rates with each provider.
What actually drives translation cost
Machine and AI translation is priced by volume of text — usually per character or per token — multiplied by the number of target languages. So the two levers are how much content you have and how many languages you want. The calculator above turns pages × words × languages into an estimate across the common providers.
Two very different pricing models
Pay for the translation itself
You pay for the text that gets translated — either directly to a provider with your own API key, or through a plan that meters translation volume. Crucially, this is effectively a one-time costper piece of content: once a string is translated and cached locally, serving it again is free. New and changed content is the only ongoing cost. Gloty is the metered-plan kind: there is no key to hold, because translation is routed through the Gloty service. Polylang Pro’s DeepL integration is the other kind — you bring your own DeepL key.
Per-word SaaS subscription
Cloud services meter your unique word count and bill a monthly subscription, with tiers that step up as you add words and languages. The same 200,000-word, five-language site can sit in a plan that re-bills every month, indefinitely — even if the content never changes. See the difference laid out in Gloty vs. Weglot.
Why the LLM column is so cheap
Smaller LLMs like GPT-4o miniare priced per token at a fraction of classic MT's per-character rate, which is why they often come out cheapest for bulk translation. The trade-off is that quality and latency vary by language and model — DeepL still leads on some European pairs. Gloty sends each string with the role it plays and its surrounding document, which is what closes most of that gap on an LLM; the service picks the engine per batch rather than leaving it to you.
Getting this cost in practice
Gloty applies this model without asking you to hold a provider account: translation is routed through the Gloty service on a flat monthly plan with a character allowance, and every result is written into your own WordPress database and reused automatically. Identical text is never paid for twice, and the allowance meters new translation only. Compare approaches against Polylang and WPML.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does it cost to translate a website with AI?
- It depends on content volume and languages, but far less than most expect. Classic machine translation (DeepL, Google) runs about $20–25 per million characters; LLMs like GPT-4o mini can be under $1 per million characters. A typical small site translated into three languages often costs a few dollars, one time.
- Why is paying per translation cheaper than a per-word subscription?
- A per-word SaaS meters the words it stores and bills every month, so content translated years ago keeps costing you, and the bill grows as you add words and languages. When you pay for the translation itself, a string is charged once and cached results are reused — the only ongoing cost is new and changed content.
- Are these numbers exact?
- No — they're estimates to show the shape of the cost. Provider prices change and content varies. Always confirm current rates with DeepL, Google, or OpenAI. Because identical text is never re-translated, real-world costs are usually lower than the estimate.
Gloty caches every translation in your own database — so you pay to translate a string once, and serving it again costs nothing.