Is the Google Translate API free?

The free tier

Yes, there's a free tier: as of November 2026, the first 500,000 characters each month are covered by a credit of up to $10 a month. Beyond that, you pay for usage.

That allowance is shared between Basic (v2) and Advanced (v3). If you use both editions, you're drawing from the same monthly credit, not getting a separate allowance for each edition or for each set of requests.

Documents aren't included.

New Google Cloud customers also get a $300 credit to use within 90 days. Keep that separate from the monthly translation allowance when you're estimating costs: one is a new-customer credit with a time limit, and the other applies each month.

Price per character

For standard neural machine translation, Google charges $20 per million characters after the free tier. For your estimate, take the characters left after the monthly allowance and price those at the per-million rate.

You don't need to convert that into a tiny decimal price for each character. Working in millions gives you the same calculation with numbers you can read.

Google also lists committed-use rates of $18 per million characters for 1 year and $16 per million for 3 years. Those are commitment rates, not the standard rate to use for an estimate without a commitment.

Which rate should go in your budget? Use $20 per million unless you're estimating a committed-use option.

Translation LLM, custom models and documents

The standard rate doesn't apply to every translation option.

Translation LLM costs $10 per million input characters plus $10 per million output characters. You'll need both sides of that calculation, rather than treating the input price as the whole bill.

Adaptive translation uses the same input-and-output pricing structure, at $25 per million input characters plus $25 per million output characters. Custom AutoML models cost $80 per million characters for the first 250 million.

Document translation is billed by the page: $0.08 per page, and the monthly free tier doesn't cover it. Glossaries are free.

How characters are counted

Spaces count. When you're estimating a catalog, site or app, include them in your character total rather than counting only the letters in your text.

Even an empty request is billed as 1 character. An empty string isn't a free request.

But don't mix the billing units: standard text translation uses characters, Translation LLM and adaptive translation charge for input and output separately, and document translation uses pages. Keep those estimates separate if you're using more than one option.

For a store owner working from a text export, the useful starting point is the character count including spaces, not just a word count.

Worked examples

For standard neural machine translation, 2 million characters a month costs $30 after the free tier. At 10 million characters a month, the cost is $190.

Those totals already include the monthly allowance. Don't subtract the credit again.

For comparison, Translinga charges $5 or $25 for those same volumes on Fast, and $10 or $50 on Quality. Those Translinga figures are for one target language, since it counts characters once per target language.

Cheaper options

Translinga is a translation API for Shopify stores, WordPress sites and apps, made by Bitgate. It has Fast at $2.50 per million characters and Quality at $5.00 per million. Every character counts, including spaces, once per target language.

Credit is prepaid from $5 and never expires. The first $1 is free, covering about 400,000 characters on Fast, and you don't need a card to get a key.

Already using Google Translate v2 requests? Those work too, with the same language codes as the DeepL and Google Translate APIs. Strings already translated in the same context come back from memory for free, in about 2 ms.

It's in early access (you'll need to request a key). Use the Get early access button on translinga.com.