Pricing & billing FAQ

How does pricing work?

You pick a monthly plan. Each plan includes a set number of source characters per month, and every translation you submit draws that allowance down by the number of characters in the text you sent. Nothing else moves the number.

The subscription is set up and charged through Stripe, monthly. If you need more characters in a given month you buy a prepaid top-up — a deliberate purchase, never an automatic overage charge.

What do the plans include?

• Personal — $25 per month. 500,000 characters a month (~82,000 words).
• Pro — $59 per month. 1,500,000 characters a month (~246,000 words). Top up any time at $15 per million characters.
• Studio — $149 per month. 5,000,000 characters a month (~820,000 words) — room for a team working one shared queue.
• Enterprise — from $1,500 per month. A negotiated rate and allowance sized to your volume, with contract terms and invoicing arranged directly. Roughly $0.06–0.09 per 1,000 words at volume. Talk to us.

The self-serve plans differ by allowance, not by features. Translation memory and the glossary, document translation, the review queue, your team members, the full API and the option to keep approved translations in your own Azure storage are on every plan.

The word counts are estimates for orientation — quotas are denominated in characters, because character counts are not open to interpretation the way word counts are (German words run long; Chinese has no spaces).

Prices are in USD and exclude sales tax. Where it applies, Stripe calculates it from your billing address and adds it at checkout, on each monthly invoice, and on top-up purchases.

What counts as a billable character?

The source characters of the text you submit — counted once, before anything runs. That is the rule, with one exception — see dense scripts below. Because the quantity is known before a model is called, the price is knowable before you press translate, and two identical documents always cost exactly the same.

A few consequences worth stating plainly: submitting the same text into two target languages counts it once per language, since it is translated once per language. Resubmitting text you have translated before counts it again, even when your translation memory answers instantly — memory makes the result better and faster, not free.

How do documents count?

A PDF, DOCX or XLSX is counted as the source characters of the text segments we actually extract from it and translate — added up across the whole file. Page count, file size, images, and layout complexity do not enter into it; a scanned ten-page contract with three sentences on each page is charged for those sentences.

Because the count comes from extraction, a document’s exact figure is settled when the job runs rather than at upload — it lands in your usage for the month like any other job.

What is not metered?

Everything we do after you press translate. The baseline translation, the reflection pass that re-reads the draft, the structured quality assessment, any repairs to weak spots, and the final verification are all included in your plan. A job that needed three repair passes and a job that sailed through on the first attempt count exactly the same.

Reading your results costs nothing either: opening the reviewer, comparing source, baseline and candidate, editing, approving, and downloading the golden DOCX or PDF are never metered, however many times you do them.

And there is no token math anywhere on your invoice. Tokens are our internal cost ledger; what you buy is characters.

Do Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Hindi count the same?

No — those scripts pack far more meaning into each character, and cost us several times more per character to translate, so a language pair involving Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai or Devanagari is metered at 3.5× the character count. It is the one multiplier in the system, and the workspace shows it under the source box before you submit: 2,000 characters, billed as 7,000. Everything else on this page works the same way for those languages.

Is there a free trial?

Yes — 150,000 source characters (about 25,000 words) over 14 days, whichever ends first, with no card required. The clock starts when you create your account.

The trial covers text translation end to end from your workspace, including every automated review pass. Two things sit outside it: layout-preserving document translation (PDF, DOCX, XLSX) and the API, both of which need a subscription. Your remaining trial characters and days are shown on your billing page.

When the trial ends — spent or timed out — add a payment method on /billing and carry on. The approved segments your trial put into translation memory are waiting for you when you subscribe.

What happens when my monthly characters run out?

The next submission is declined, with a prompt to buy a top-up. You are never charged an overage automatically — a surprise invoice is not something this system can produce. Your allowance resets with the new billing month.

Two things can get you translating again, and they land at different moments. A prepaid top-up is credited as soon as the payment clears, so it is the only one that unblocks the month you are in. Switching to a larger plan in the billing portal takes effect at your next billing period — it raises the allowance from then on, and does nothing for today.

Which is cheaper depends on your volume, and it is often the top-up: at $15 per million characters, a pack usually prices characters below what the next plan up charges for them. Your billing page does the arithmetic for your actual usage and tells you which way is cheaper — including when the answer is to stay on the plan you already have.

Because a document’s exact character count is only known once we have extracted its text, a document job already under way can finish slightly past your allowance; the limit then binds on the next submission.

How do top-ups work?

Top-ups are prepaid packs of 1,000,000 characters at $15 a pack, bought from your billing page. You can buy up to 5 packs in a single purchase, and your card is charged then and there — we do not store it for automatic charges, so a top-up can never fire on its own.

Unused top-up characters do not expire. They are not tied to a billing month: the balance sits there until your plan allowance for a month runs out, and only then does work start drawing it down. Your unspent balance is capped at 10,000,000 characters — past that, use what you have or talk to us about enterprise volume.

Top-ups are for subscribers; they are not part of the free trial.

Does human review cost anything?

No. The human-in-the-loop step is the product, not an add-on: reviewing, editing, approving and publishing are included, and so is the AI quality gate that decides which segments deserve your attention in the first place. Neither has a separate line, a per-seat review fee, or a metered rate — what your plan sets is the monthly character allowance, not who may work in the workspace.

Can a job bill me twice?

No. Your plan is a flat monthly fee, so there is no per-job charge to duplicate in the first place — the only charges that can reach your card are the subscription itself and a top-up you clicked to buy. Each job’s usage is recorded exactly once as well, keyed by the job’s own identifier, so a retried or resubmitted job cannot count the same characters twice against your allowance.

When am I charged?

You add a card through Stripe Checkout when you subscribe — right away, or whenever your free trial ends — and Stripe charges your plan monthly from there, in advance at the start of each billing period. The month’s characters are yours up front, and nothing you translate afterwards can add to that invoice. The only other charge that can ever occur is a top-up you click to buy.

Where can I see my usage?

In the Usage & billing pane of your workspace: the characters billed for the period, your monthly character limit, and how much of it you have used. The same pane exports the month’s per-job billing records as CSV, so you can see exactly which job spent what.

Your /billing page carries the rest of the picture — subscription status, remaining trial characters and days, and your prepaid top-up balance — and the Stripe billing portal shows the invoices themselves. The numbers agree: they are billed from the same per-job records.

What if my payment fails?

Stripe retries the charge automatically. While the subscription is past due, new translations are declined — but you keep full read access to your workspace, your existing jobs, and your golden files. Fix the card in the billing portal and new work resumes immediately.

How do I cancel?

Open your /billing page, click Manage subscription, and cancel in the Stripe Customer Portal. It is self-service — no email, no phone call, no retention conversation.

After cancelling you keep read access to your workspace: your jobs, your translation memory, your terminology, and downloads of the golden files you have already produced. What stops is new translation work — submissions are refused (HTTP 402) until billing is current again.

Ready to try it? Sign in and run your first translation, or start with the getting-started guide.