Google Cloud Translation
Google's Cloud Translation API (NMT) with batch and document translation, glossaries, custom AutoML models and an LLM-based Translation tier.
Google offers standard NMT, custom models and an LLM translation tier through Cloud Translation. Standard NMT costs $20 per million characters after 500,000 free each month, with lower committed-use rates. Translation LLM charges separately for input and output characters. The Advanced v3 API has an EU regional endpoint; choose it explicitly if processing location matters.
- Headquarters
- 馃嚭馃嚫 United States
- Parent jurisdiction
- 馃嚭馃嚫 United States (parent: Alphabet)
- EU self-serve plan
- Available; check eligible plans and regions
- GDPR DPA
- Yes
- Billing
- payg
- Free tier
- First 500,000 characters/month free (applied as a $10 monthly credit).
- Open source
- No
- Website
- cloud.google.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.
| 1M additional characters |
|---|
| $20 |
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.
- Base fee / month
- $0
- Included characters / month (millions)
- 0.5
- 1M additional characters
- $20
NMT text translation (Basic and Advanced): first 500k characters/month free, then $20 per 1M characters up to 1B/month; above 1B contact sales. Committed-use savings plans lower this to $18 or $16. Translation LLM is billed $10 per 1M input characters plus $10 per 1M output characters (about the same as NMT for similar-length output). Adaptive translation (LLM with example sentences) is $25 + $25 per 1M input/output characters; AutoML custom models $80/M chars (falling to $30/M at 4B+). Document translation $0.08/page (NMT). Cloud Translation Advanced (v3) offers an EU regional endpoint (translate-eu.googleapis.com) to keep processing in the EU. Cloud Data Processing Addendum applies.
Managed alternatives
At 50M characters / month. Adjust usage and requirements.
Google Cloud Translation: $11,880/yr estimated.
- GPT-6 Luna (via OpenAI API): $111/yr estimated 路 $11,769/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 路 $11,764/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 路 $11,741/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 路 $11,601/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 路 $11,558/yr bill differenceModeled ratesToken-to-character conversion assumes English source, short prompts and European-language output. Quality and retries are not priced.
No cheaper managed estimate matches your filters. Adjust your usage or compare with your actual contract bill.
The price difference leaves out migration costs, operating costs and any features you鈥檇 need to replace.
Self-hosted options
Operating cost is not estimated. These options are not counted as savings against managed services.
Want a European-owned provider? See European alternatives to Google Cloud Translation among european machine translation providers.
Compare Google Cloud Translation
Found a wrong rate or plan restriction? Report a correction with a current source.