Google Cloud Translation API API pricing: plans, free tier and what to watch for

Google Cloud Translation API API pricing at a glance: Free tier $0, NMT text (Basic v2 / Advanced v3) $20 / 1M chars, NMT document translation (Advanced) $0.08 / page, Translation LLM $10 in + $10 out / 1M chars

The short answer

Google Cloud Translation API is billed per million chars. It has a free tier: 500k chars/mo (never expires). The paid plans we list start at $20 / 1M chars (NMT text (Basic v2 / Advanced v3)).

Plans and prices

Plan	Price	What it covers
Free tier	$0	First 500,000 characters/month free (credit applies collectively across Basic and Advanced editions)
NMT text (Basic v2 / Advanced v3)	$20 / 1M chars	Standard neural machine translation over the free tier; Basic over 1B chars/month is contact-sales
NMT document translation (Advanced)	$0.08 / page	DOCX/PPTX/PDF; max 4,000 chars or 500 words per page
Translation LLM	$10 in + $10 out / 1M chars	LLM-based text translation, priced separately on input and output characters
Adaptive Translation (LLM)	$25 in + $25 out / 1M chars	Learns from supplied examples to adapt to style/domain
Custom AutoML models	$80 / 1M chars (tiered down to $30)	$80/M under 250M, $60/M to 2.5B, $40/M to 4B, $30/M above; training $45/hr capped at $300/job

How Google Cloud Translation API bills you

The pricing model is per million chars. Mature hyperscaler MT (NMT, LLM and adaptive tiers) with broad language coverage, deep SDKs and a non-expiring monthly free tier. Best suited to: hyperscaler mt at global scale.

What to watch for on the bill

Pay-per-character cost compounds fast at scale ($20/M); custom AutoML starts at a steep $80/M

The pricing page we read

Google Cloud Translation API pricing page, captured for reference — Capture of cloud.google.com. Captured from Germany, so some vendors show local prices or currency. Listed prices are verified Jun 27, 2026. The live page may differ.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/translate/pricing. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.

Compare Google Cloud Translation API with alternatives

Other translation apis: Azure AI Translator, Amazon Translate, DeepL API, Lara Translate, Lokalise.

Looking at quality rather than price? See the Google Cloud Translation API score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Google Cloud Translation API pricing.