How much does translation cost with AI?
Estimate the AI translation cost of translating support articles, business documents, product content, and localization copy with a general-purpose LLM. Enter your document volume, source text size, and instruction complexity to get a Low / Likely / High monthly cost estimate. Everything runs locally in your browser — no data is sent to any server.
This calculator estimates translation performed with general-purpose LLM APIs. Dedicated machine-translation services such as Google Translate and DeepL use different pricing models (typically per character) and are not included — see "What this doesn't price" below.
- No login
- No credit card
- No API calls
- Estimate only
Configure your translation workload
Estimated monthly cost
This calculator estimates translation performed with general-purpose LLM APIs. Dedicated machine-translation services such as Google Translate and DeepL use different pricing models (typically per character) and are not included. Also not included: professional human translation, localization project-management fees, OCR, or file-conversion costs.
This is an estimate, not a billing guarantee. Actual costs depend on your provider's exact tokeniser, your real source text and target language, and your billing tier.
How this estimate works
- Translation instruction
- The source text
Reads the source text and returns it translated into the target language.
The translated text — usually close to source length, but not always identical.
What this doesn't price: Google Translate, DeepL, and other dedicated translation APIs
This calculator estimates translation performed with general-purpose LLM APIs only. Google Translate, DeepL, Amazon Translate, and similar dedicated machine-translation services are not included — they use an entirely different pricing model (typically billed per character, not per token) on rate cards unrelated to any model in T9's catalogue. If you're specifically comparing Google Translate or DeepL pricing, this tool is not the right source — check those providers' own pricing pages directly.
Also not included: professional human translation, localization project-management fees, OCR, or file-conversion costs.
Why translated output isn't always the same size as the source
Translated text is routinely shorter or longer than its source, depending on how information-dense the target language is — some languages pack more meaning per word, others need more words to say the same thing. Rather than assume a fixed 1:1 ratio (or pretend to know the exact expansion for every language pair, which no provider publishes), this calculator applies a documented Low/Likely/High expansion range to the source length: Low models a more compact target language, Likely a roughly equal-length pair, and High a more verbose target language.
Why instruction complexity matters
A plain "translate this to Spanish" instruction costs very little on its own. A real style guide, glossary, and terminology-consistency ruleset — common for product and brand content — adds real instruction tokens on every single call, separate from the source text itself.
Why model choice changes cost
Translation sends a meaningful amount of both input (the source) and output (the translation), so both a model's input and output rate matter here — unlike an extraction workload, where output is small and input dominates. This calculator applies each model's own current input and output rate automatically.
Low / Likely / High explained
A short source text, a minimal instruction, and a more compact target language.
A typical source length, a standard instruction, and a roughly equal-length target. Plan against this number.
A long source text, a detailed instruction, and a more verbose target language. Budget against this.
Cut your cost
Example monthly translation costs
These worked examples use the same default assumptions as the calculator above — a medium-length source document and a standard instruction — with GPT-5.4 Mini. Only the number of items per month changes between rows. Use the calculator above to model your own usage or a different model.
| Usage level | Items / month | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light usage | 50 | $0.3644 | $0.6956 | $1.31 |
| Typical usage | 200 | $1.46 | $2.78 | $5.22 |
| Heavy usage | 1,000 | $7.29 | $13.91 | $26.11 |
And here's the per-item cost for three realistic content types — a short support article, a medium business document, and a long localization document — with GPT-5.4 Mini, each with its own source size and instruction complexity:
| Content type | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short support article | $0.001822 | $0.003487 | $0.006976 |
| Medium business document | $0.007287 | $0.0139 | $0.0261 |
| Long localization document | $0.0242 | $0.0415 | $0.0781 |
Caveats
- Google Translate, DeepL, and other dedicated machine-translation APIs are not priced by this calculator. Those services bill per character on their own rate cards, unrelated to any model in T9's catalogue — check each provider's own pricing page for that comparison.
- The translated-output expansion ratio (Low 0.85× / Likely 1.0× / High 1.3× of source tokens) is this project's own descriptive assumption, not a provider-published figure or a claim about any specific language pair — no provider publishes a token-expansion table by language. Real output length depends heavily on your actual target language.
- These estimates use the same reference document-length and instruction-prompt token ranges as the site's document summary calculator, accurate to ±10–15% for plain English source text.
- Each provider uses a different tokeniser. Actual token counts may differ ±5–10% between providers for the same content, and non-English text can tokenize differently from English at a similar word count.
- Professional human translation, localization project-management fees, OCR, and file-conversion costs are not included. This tool only estimates the language model's own input/output token cost.
- Prices shown are manually verified against each provider's official pricing page as of 2026-09-08. AI provider pricing changes frequently — verify at your provider's official pricing page before making budget decisions.
- The long-context pricing tier, where a selected model has one, is resolved against each item's own input size, never a monthly aggregate — a single long document can trip the higher rate even when most of your items don't.
- The context-window warning above appears when an item's combined tokens exceed 80% of the selected model's context window — a safety margin before truncation or failure risk, not a hard limit at 100%.
This is an estimate, not a billing guarantee. Always confirm against your provider's usage dashboard and official pricing before committing a budget.