The hidden costs of automatic website translation

Is it true that you can spend thousands of dollars per year on automatic website translations? The truth is hidden in the details, which is what we’ll be investigating in this article by breaking down the pricing models of 3 WordPress translation plugins.

In today's interconnected digital landscape, offering your WordPress website in multiple languages isn't just a luxury – it's increasingly becoming a business necessity. While English remains dominant online, the majority of global consumers prefer to buy products in their native language, even if they can speak English.

A multilingual website opens doors to new markets, builds trust with international audiences, and significantly boosts your SEO potential. However, many website owners are caught off guard by the unexpected complexities and costs that come with WordPress translation. Let's explore these hidden costs that could impact your multilingual journey.

Translation pricing should be straightforward, however there’s more than one way to translate a website, which leads to some convoluted pricing models.

There are traditional options, such as hiring a language expert to manually translate your content (this is the most expensive option by far), or translating everything yourself assuming you speak multiple languages. You could also make use of great tools such as Google Translate or DeepL, these tend to be cost effective, and under certain limits, even free.

Then of course there are new AI language models offered by website translation companies. The pricing for these AI tools is more complex and we’ll get into that later on. So to simplify things a bit, we’ll only focus on 3 major plugins, TranslatePress, WPML, and Weglot. You can also watch our video to see the full analysis by Sam on YouTube.

First we’ll break down what they offer for free, and then we’ll compare their premium plans by using an example of a website with 200 thousand words to get a real estimation of their costs.

To help us write this article accurately, we reached out to the team at TranslatePress who provided us with way more detailed insights about the translation business. And we will also reference articles from Weglot and WPML for accurate pricing data. TranslatePress is also offering Barn2 readers a 15% discount, which we think is pretty awesome.

Free website translation options

Is it possible to translate a website completely for free? Here’s what our 3 chosen plugins have to offer.

WPML

Unfortunately, WPML doesn’t even offer a free version so we’ll come back to them in the next section.

TranslatePress

Here's what TranslatePress offers with their free plan:

• Unlimited manual translations for one language In this case the website would have 2 languages total and you will need to fill in the translations yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. But there’s no limits on this regarding how many words you translate.
• Automatic translation with Google Translate API Note that this may not be entirely free as Google might charge you directly depending on your usage. The free tier of Google Translate includes 500,000 translated characters for free per month (this works out to around 100,000 words). If you exceed that limit, you’ll need to pay for your usage, starting at $20 per one million characters over the free limit.
• You get to own your translations No matter what happens in the future, any translations that have already been made are yours to keep, forever.

Weglot

Weglot offers a small amount of services on their free plan, here's what you get:

• Translate up to 2,000 words per month into one language on a single site
• Editing control and access to AI translations, but no access to professional translators
• Visitor language redirection and multilingual SEO

Objectively speaking, 2,000 words is barely anything for a typical WordPress website. So it’s nice that there is a free option, but it seems as though you’ll have to upgrade almost immediately after starting.

Premium website translation plans

TranslatePress

TranslatePress has 3 premium plans with the following prices (but don't forget that Barn2 readers get 15% off at checkout):

• Personal plan (1 website) - €99/ year (+VAT)
• Business plan (3 websites) - €199/ year (+VAT)
• Developer plan (unlimited websites) - €349/ year (+VAT)

Note that the main difference between the paid plans is the number of sites you can use your license on.

All of the premium plans come with the following:

• Unlimited manual translations
• Unlimited added languages
• TranslatePress AI

TranslatePress AI is an automatic website translation service that works on a credit-based system. You get a certain amount of AI translated words included with every plan:

• Personal plan - 50,000 AI Translated Words
• Business plan - 200,000 AI Translated Words
• Developer plan - 500,000 AI Translated Words

And then, if you run out of AI words you can purchase more in batches like this:

• 100,000 AI Translated Words - €24 (+VAT)
• 200,000 AI Translated Words - €40 (+VAT)
• 500,000 AI Translated Words - €90 (+VAT)

Alternatively, you can also use the DeepL API which works in a similar way to Google Translate. The free tier of DeepL includes 500,000 translated characters for free per month, which is around 100,000 words. If you exceed that limit, you’ll need to pay for your usage, starting at $30.49 per one million characters over the free limit.

The main downside of using Google Translate or DeepL is that they involve quite a convoluted setup with creating the API keys and linking them to your site, while TranslatePress AI requires no setup.

Also with Google and DeepL you pay as you go which might make it trickier to control your costs and you might end up spending more than planned, while with TranslatePress you pay first, and then you use your credits until they run out so you know exactly how much you spend.

Weglot

Weglot has a lot of pricing tiers. Simply put, you are billed a monthly/yearly fee for a certain amount of words to be translated:

• Starter - 10,000 words: €150/ year (+VAT)
• Business - 50,000 words: €290/ year (+VAT)
• Pro - 200,000 words: €790/ year (+VAT)
• Advanced - 1,000,000 words: €2,990/ year (+VAT)
• Extended - 5,000,000 words: €6,990/ year (+VAT)

They also have monthly plans that are a bit more expensive, but since both TranslatePress and WPML are billed yearly we thought this is the fairest comparison. They are all billed monthly, but you get a better deal if you subscribe for the whole year.

What you need to understand about Weglot is that this is a classic SaaS, which means that once you stop paying the monthly fee, you lose all of your translations. By comparison, with TranslatePress you own your translations. If you pay to use it for a year and you don’t renew your license the next year, you can still display the translations you already have in place. You won’t be able to add new translations of course, but the old ones are yours forever.

WPML

WPML has an even more convoluted way of calculating their costs for automatic translation which makes it hard for people to fully grasp what they are going to end up paying.

They have 3 pricing tiers, however the cheapest one doesn’t include automatic translation:

• Multilingual Blog - €39/ year (+VAT) - no automatic translation
• Multilingual CMS - €99/ year (+VAT) - 90,000 automatic translation credits
• Multilingual Agency - €199/ year (+VAT) - 180,000 automatic translation credits

Next, you have to calculate what these credits mean, which is where most people will get totally lost (it feels like buying gold coins in a video game). Here’s what WPML’s credit system means:

Translation credits are WPML's "currency" for automatic translation. One word to translate to each language will cost you:

• 2 credits with Google
• 2 credits with DeepL
• 1 credit with Azure
• 4 credits with WPML AI

Then, if you use up all the credits included in your plan, you can buy more for the following prices:

• 40,000 credits for €50 (+VAT)
• 200,000 credits for €180 (+VAT)
• Or pay-as-you-go for credits, which gives you a bit of a lower rate.

Automatic translation cost comparison

Now that we have a better idea of the pricing structures, let’s find out how much it would cost to translate a website with about 200,000 words on it using each service.

Weglot

With Weglot you would need the Pro plan with 200,000 words included, priced at €790/year. But in order to keep the translations up, you would have to keep paying. This is something a first-time user might not realize. Apart from the pretty high price you have to pay up-front, it is also a long-term investment you have to keep up.

Total price to translate 200,000 words: €790/year (+VAT).

WPML

Your cheapest option for translating a 200,000 word website with WPML is getting the Multilingual Agency plan at €199/year (this gives you 90,000 words translated with Google Translate/DeepL). Then you'll still need to add another 110,000 extra words, which you can do in 2 ways:

1. If you were to buy extra credits for these words, you’d have to buy both their extra credit packages (200,000 credits for €50 and 40,000 credits for €180). The total cost is €429 (+VAT).
2. If you pay-as-you-go, their calculator adds another €110. The total cost is €309 (+VAT).

And it’s worth noting that all of their other options are more expensive, with their own WPML AI being about double the price.

Total price to translate 200,000 words: €309/year (+VAT).

TranslatePress

With TranslatePress plus their own AI you can pay €99/year for one website which gives you 50,000 included words and then supplement with 200,000 extra AI words for €40. That’s a total of €139 (+VAT) in a year. And don't forget that you get to keep those translations forever (and you also have a few words to spare).

Or, if you only need one extra language, you can use the free version of TranslatePress and connect it to the Google Translate API where you would pay around [$20 total for 200,000 words] to Google directly. This means that if you stay under roughly ~100,000 words you might even come away with it being completely free.

Total price to translate 200,000 words: $20 (+tax) for one language | or €139 (+VAT) for more than one language.

This left us wondering WHY TranslatePress is so much cheaper, are they cutting on quality somehow?

When we asked them about this, they clarified that the quality is the same but the way they optimize costs is through translation memory - that is by reusing translations of a certain string that’s then translated everywhere it appears, storing everything in your own database.

What is the cheapest automatic websites translation service?

Of the 3 translation plugins that we analyzed today TranslatePress has the best offer for both free and premium plans. They are significantly cheaper than WPML and Weglot for a variety of reasons, while not compromising on the quality of the translations. Don't forget to use this link and save a further 15% when purchasing any TranslatePress plan.