Cheap enough to translate everything — almost
LLM translation collapses the cost of going multilingual, but proofread anything high-stakes. For bulk jobs, batch pricing cuts it further — see the batch savings calculator.
Machine translation: API vs LLM pricing
Dedicated translation APIs (Google, DeepL, Amazon) price per character — about $10–$25 per million characters. LLMs restructured this market: translating via a cheap model costs $1–$5 per million characters equivalent at current token prices, with quality that matches or beats dedicated APIs on major language pairs. The catch is throughput and glossary control — translation APIs offer terminology enforcement, format preservation, and batch endpoints that LLM pipelines rebuild by hand. Under 500k characters monthly, free tiers cover everything; above that, the LLM route usually wins on price if you can tolerate building the plumbing.