The short answer
Azure AI Translator is billed per million chars. It has a free tier: 2M chars/mo (F0, recurring). The paid plans we list start at $10 / 1M characters (Standard (S1), Text Translation).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free (F0) | $0 | Up to 2 million characters/month combined across text translation, detection, dictionary, transliteration, and Custom Translator training; no SLA. |
| Standard (S1), Text Translation | $10 / 1M characters | Pay-as-you-go standard neural text translation; ~half Google Cloud Translation's API rate. |
| Document Translation | $15 / 1M characters | Asynchronous whole-document translation preserving layout across formats like PDF, DOCX, PPTX. |
| Custom Translation | $40 / 1M characters | Translation served by a customer-trained domain-specific model. |
| Custom model training | $10 / 1M source+target chars (capped $300/training) | One-time cost to train a Custom Translator model on your bilingual data. |
| S1 Commitment tiers | Volume discounts at 250M / 1B / 4B chars | Monthly commitment plans with progressively lower per-million rates for high-volume standard translation (excludes Custom Translation). |
How Azure AI Translator bills you
The pricing model is per million chars. Microsoft's MT service (now in Foundry Tools) with a generous recurring free tier, custom translation, and a 99.9% standard-tier SLA. Best suited to: enterprise mt with custom models.
What to watch for on the bill
- Output can feel overly formal with limited control over tone or style
- Older S2–S4 pay-as-you-go tiers were deprecated, narrowing flexible plan options
The pricing page we read
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/translator/. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Azure AI Translator with alternatives
- Google Cloud Translation API vs Azure AI Translator pricing
- Azure AI Translator vs Amazon Translate pricing
- Azure AI Translator vs DeepL API pricing
Other translation apis: Google Cloud Translation API, Amazon Translate, DeepL API, Lara Translate, Lokalise.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Azure AI Translator score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Azure AI Translator pricing.