Google Cloud Translation API vs Amazon Translate pricing
Both are in translation apis. Google Cloud Translation API is billed per million chars; Amazon Translate is billed per million chars. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
Google Cloud Translation APIFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 500k chars/mo (never expires)
- Billed
- Per million chars
- Best for
- Hyperscaler MT at global scale
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Amazon TranslateFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 2M chars/mo for 12 months
- Billed
- Per million chars
- Best for
- MT inside the AWS stack
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Google Cloud Translation API plans
| 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 |
- Pay-per-character cost compounds fast at scale ($20/M); custom AutoML starts at a steep $80/M
Amazon Translate plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Standard Text Translation | $15.00 / 1M characters | Real-time and asynchronous batch text translation; billed per character including whitespace, pay-as-you-go. |
| Batch Document Translation | $15.00 / 1M characters | Asynchronous translation of documents stored in Amazon S3. |
| Real-Time Document Translation (Text & HTML) | $15.00 / 1M characters | Synchronous document translation preserving formatting; no free tier. |
| Real-Time Document Translation (Docx) | $30.00 / 1M characters | Synchronous Word .docx translation; no free tier. |
| Active Custom Translation (ACT) | $60.00 / 1M characters | Domain-customized output using parallel data; includes 200 GB free parallel-data storage ($0.023/GB/mo overage). |
| Free Tier | $0 | 2M characters/month free for first 12 months (standard & batch); ACT 500K characters/month free for 2 months. |
- No casual free tier beyond the 12-month allowance; requires AWS account and credit card, frustrating occasional users
- Docx real-time translation costs double ($30/1M) and ACT is 4x standard ($60/1M)