Google Cloud Translation API vs DeepL API pricing
Both are in translation apis. Google Cloud Translation API is billed per million chars; DeepL API 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
DeepL APIFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 500k chars/mo (API Free)
- Billed
- Per million chars
- Best for
- High-quality MT API for developers
- 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
DeepL API plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| API Free | $0/month | Up to 500,000 characters per month; full text and document translation API access, no cost. |
| API Growth | ~$26/month (annual) | Includes ~12M characters/year (~1M/month) with overage billed around $27.50 per additional million characters. |
| Enterprise API | Custom | Up-front custom commitments for characters, speech-to-text and speech-to-speech; pay-as-you-go above commitment; includes 99.9% uptime SLA. |
- Narrow language coverage (~30 languages) vs Google's 100+; quality and availability drop sharply for Asian, African and Indic languages
- Premium per-character pricing (~$25/M chars) is far costlier than LLM-based translation, a developer measured ~$4/hr vs under $0.01/hr for Gemini Flash
- Customer support and billing rigidity are recurring complaints (support rated ~4.2/5 on Capterra; reports of 'no compensation' for failures)