Is the DeepL API free?

The free Developer plan

As of November 2026, DeepL API Developer is free, with a one-time allowance of 1,000,000 characters. You can use the API without paying until you've used that allowance, but it isn't a monthly quota, and it doesn't reset when a new month starts.

That's the catch.

Once you've used those characters, you need to upgrade to Growth. If you're budgeting for ongoing use, don't treat that free allowance as something you'll get again.

Developer includes 1 API key and 1 glossary. It doesn't include speech-to-text. If those are the limits you're checking before getting a key, that's what the free plan gives you.

What happened to API Free and API Pro

The old DeepL API Free plan offered 500,000 characters a month. That plan and API Pro can no longer be purchased.

Still looking for the monthly free allowance? It belonged to API Free, not the current Developer plan. The difference is the reset: the old plan had a monthly allowance, while Developer gives you its characters once.

For a new purchase, the names to look at are Developer and Growth. Don't use the old API Free allowance when working out how much free translation you'll have available.

Growth pricing

Growth costs €23.80 a month, billed annually, plus usage. It includes 12 million characters a year, and extra characters cost €22 per million.

The billing period matters here: the price is expressed per month, but billing is annual, and the included character allowance is annual too. Don't read those 12 million characters as a fresh monthly allowance.

Growth has a usage limit of 50 million characters a month. That's separate from the included yearly characters, not an amount you can translate each month for the base price.

Enterprise API has custom pricing.

How characters are counted

DeepL bills for characters in your source text. Its context parameter isn't billed, so text supplied through that parameter doesn't add to your billed character count.

Documents need a closer look. For formats like DOCX, PPTX and PDF, document translation is billed at a minimum of 50,000 characters per file, even when the file contains less text than that.

That minimum is per file.

Requests can be up to 128 KiB. Keep that request-size limit separate from the character allowances: 128 KiB is the request limit, while the free allowance, included Growth usage and extra usage are measured in characters.

What a month really costs

Say you translate 2 million characters a month for a year. That comes to 24 million characters.

Growth's base charge is €285.60 for the year, and it includes 12 million characters. You have another 12 million to pay for at €22 per million, adding €264 to the bill.

The total is €549.60 a year, or about €45.80 a month. That monthly figure includes the extra characters in this example; €23.80 is the base monthly price with annual billing.

For comparison, the same 24 million characters cost $120 on Translinga's Quality tier, or $60 on Fast. Those prices are in dollars, while the DeepL prices above are in euros.

A cheaper DeepL-compatible option

Translinga is a translation API for Shopify stores, WordPress sites and apps, made by Bitgate. It's in early access: you request a key through the Get early access button on translinga.com.

It accepts DeepL API requests as they are, including the DeepL-Auth-Key header, and DeepL's own Node and Python libraries work when you point them at https://api.translinga.com. Switching means changing the URL and your key.

Fast costs $2.50 per million characters; Quality costs $5.00 per million. Every character counts, including spaces, once per target language. You prepay credit from $5, and it never expires. The first $1 is free (about 400,000 characters on Fast), and you don't need a card for a key.

There's also tag handling: Liquid tags, HTML and placeholders are taken out before translation. Every reply is checked tag by tag, and a string is retried if a tag comes back missing.

In our English-to-Dutch DeepL API test on October 27, 2026, DeepL changed the Shopify filter | money to | geld, making Shopify print the raw amount in cents. It also translated "Save" in a combat menu as "Opslaan," meaning saving a file, even with context supplied. On a billing page, "Charge" became "Opladen," meaning charging a battery.