Azure AI Translator vs Amazon Translate pricing
Both are in translation apis. Azure AI Translator is billed per million chars; Amazon Translate is billed per million chars. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
Azure AI TranslatorFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 2M chars/mo (F0, recurring)
- Billed
- Per million chars
- Best for
- Enterprise MT with custom models
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Amazon TranslateFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 2M chars/mo for 12 months
- Billed
- Per million chars
- Best for
- MT inside the AWS stack
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Azure AI Translator plans
| 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). |
- 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
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/translator/
Amazon Translate plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Standard Text Translation | $15.00 / 1M characters | Real-time and asynchronous batch text translation; billed per character including whitespace, pay-as-you-go. |
| Batch Document Translation | $15.00 / 1M characters | Asynchronous translation of documents stored in Amazon S3. |
| Real-Time Document Translation (Text & HTML) | $15.00 / 1M characters | Synchronous document translation preserving formatting; no free tier. |
| Real-Time Document Translation (Docx) | $30.00 / 1M characters | Synchronous Word .docx translation; no free tier. |
| Active Custom Translation (ACT) | $60.00 / 1M characters | Domain-customized output using parallel data; includes 200 GB free parallel-data storage ($0.023/GB/mo overage). |
| Free Tier | $0 | 2M characters/month free for first 12 months (standard & batch); ACT 500K characters/month free for 2 months. |
- No casual free tier beyond the 12-month allowance; requires AWS account and credit card, frustrating occasional users
- Docx real-time translation costs double ($30/1M) and ACT is 4x standard ($60/1M)