DeepL API

German neural MT API with glossaries, formality control and document translation; EU-hosted, billed per character on top of a small base fee.

DeepL processes text in EU data centers under German jurisdiction. API Pro costs €4.99/month plus €22 per million source characters, including spaces. Growth adds features at the same usage rate, so it does not lower the character cost. Paid-plan text is not used for training. Compare glossary support and translation quality as well as the rate.

Headquarters: 🇩🇪 Germany
Parent jurisdiction: 🇩🇪 Germany
EU self-serve plan: Available; check eligible plans and regions
GDPR DPA: Yes
Billing: subscription
Free tier: API Developer (free): character-capped monthly allowance (1M chars/month in DeepL's plan data), no overage.
Open source: No
Website: www.deepl.com
Source last checked: 2026-10-06
Pricing evidence: Published rates

Pricing

Calculated from the listed vendor rates; exclusions still apply. How to read these estimates.

Plan	Base fee / month	1M additional characters
API Developer (free)	$0	$0
API Pro	$5.59	$24.64

Allowances, plan limits & calculation details

Rates are shown at their recorded precision. A zero means no charge in this calculation; the vendor may charge for things we leave out. See the notes for usage assumptions and currency conversions.

API Developer (free)

Base fee / month: $0
Included characters / month (millions): 1
1M additional characters: $0
Modeled plan limits: ≤ 1 characters / month (millions)

API Pro

Base fee / month: $5.59
Included characters / month (millions): 0
1M additional characters: $24.64

EUR list prices from the plan data on deepl.com/pro (German storefront): API Pro €4.99/month base + €22 per 1M characters (converted at 1.12 USD/EUR = $5.59 + $24.64; the US storefront is quoted elsewhere at $5.49 + $25). API Growth is €29.75/month (€23.80/month billed yearly) with the same €22/M usage rate plus more glossaries, CAT-tool and admin features, so it is never cheaper for pure volume. API Enterprise: contract, with a cheaper character add-on (€20/M) in the plan data. The free API Developer plan is capped at 1M characters/month per DeepL's plan data (the legacy API Free plan was 500k); billed characters count source text, including spaces. Text is processed in DeepL's EU data centres and not used for training on paid plans. DeepL SE, Cologne; DPA included in the terms.

Managed alternatives

At 50M characters / month. Adjust usage and requirements.

DeepL API: $14,851/yr estimated.

GPT-6 Luna (via OpenAI API): $111/yr estimated · $14,740/yr bill differenceModeled ratesToken-to-character conversion assumes English source, short prompts and European-language output. Quality and retries are not priced.
Qwen3.8-Flash (via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio): $116/yr estimated · $14,735/yr bill differenceModeled ratesToken-to-character conversion assumes English source, short prompts and European-language output. Quality and retries are not priced.
Mistral Small 4 (via Mistral API): $140/yr estimated · $14,712/yr bill differenceModeled ratesToken-to-character conversion assumes English source, short prompts and European-language output. Quality and retries are not priced.
DeepSeek V4 Flash (via DeepSeek API): $279/yr estimated · $14,572/yr bill differenceModeled ratesToken-to-character conversion assumes English source, short prompts and European-language output. Quality and retries are not priced.
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite (via Gemini API): $323/yr estimated · $14,529/yr bill differenceModeled ratesToken-to-character conversion assumes English source, short prompts and European-language output. Quality and retries are not priced.

The price difference leaves out migration costs, operating costs and any features you’d need to replace.

Self-hosted options

Operating cost is not estimated. These options are not counted as savings against managed services.

LibreTranslate

Compare DeepL API

Found a wrong rate or plan restriction? Report a correction with a current source.