The short answer
DeepL API is billed per million chars. It has a free tier: 500k chars/mo (API Free). The paid plans we list start at ~$26/month (annual) (API Growth).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| API Free | $0/month | Up to 500,000 characters per month; full text and document translation API access, no cost. |
| API Growth | ~$26/month (annual) | Includes ~12M characters/year (~1M/month) with overage billed around $27.50 per additional million characters. |
| Enterprise API | Custom | Up-front custom commitments for characters, speech-to-text and speech-to-speech; pay-as-you-go above commitment; includes 99.9% uptime SLA. |
How DeepL API bills you
The pricing model is per million chars. Premium-quality neural MT with a clean REST API and official SDKs in six languages; the go-to when translation accuracy matters most. Best suited to: high-quality mt api for developers.
What to watch for on the bill
- Narrow language coverage (~30 languages) vs Google's 100+; quality and availability drop sharply for Asian, African and Indic languages
- Premium per-character pricing (~$25/M chars) is far costlier than LLM-based translation, a developer measured ~$4/hr vs under $0.01/hr for Gemini Flash
- Customer support and billing rigidity are recurring complaints (support rated ~4.2/5 on Capterra; reports of 'no compensation' for failures)
- Rate-limit ('Too many requests') and character-limit errors require manual cost-control and backoff handling
The pricing page we read
Source: https://www.eesel.ai/blog/deepl-pricing. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare DeepL API with alternatives
- Google Cloud Translation API vs DeepL API pricing
- Azure AI Translator vs DeepL API pricing
- Amazon Translate vs DeepL API pricing
Other translation apis: Google Cloud Translation API, Azure AI Translator, Amazon Translate, Lara Translate, Lokalise.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the DeepL API score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: DeepL API pricing.