Google Cloud Translation API vs Azure AI Translator pricing
Both are in translation apis. Google Cloud Translation API is billed per million chars; Azure AI Translator is billed per million chars. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
Google Cloud Translation APIFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 500k chars/mo (never expires)
- Billed
- Per million chars
- Best for
- Hyperscaler MT at global scale
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
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
Google Cloud Translation API plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 | First 500,000 characters/month free (credit applies collectively across Basic and Advanced editions) |
| NMT text (Basic v2 / Advanced v3) | $20 / 1M chars | Standard neural machine translation over the free tier; Basic over 1B chars/month is contact-sales |
| NMT document translation (Advanced) | $0.08 / page | DOCX/PPTX/PDF; max 4,000 chars or 500 words per page |
| Translation LLM | $10 in + $10 out / 1M chars | LLM-based text translation, priced separately on input and output characters |
| Adaptive Translation (LLM) | $25 in + $25 out / 1M chars | Learns from supplied examples to adapt to style/domain |
| Custom AutoML models | $80 / 1M chars (tiered down to $30) | $80/M under 250M, $60/M to 2.5B, $40/M to 4B, $30/M above; training $45/hr capped at $300/job |
- Pay-per-character cost compounds fast at scale ($20/M); custom AutoML starts at a steep $80/M
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/