---
layout: post
title: Paid Version of Google Translate API
image: >-
  http://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/api-evangelist-site/blog/Tag-Cloud-Google-Translate.png
author:
  name: kinlane
tags:
  - ai
---
Back in May [Googledeprecatedthe free version of the Google Translate API](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-our-apis.html "Google deprecated the free version of the Google Translate API"), and pissed off a lot of people along the way. I talked about [building your business around Google or any other APIs](http://apievangelist.com/2011/05/28/building-your-business-around-google-or-any-other-apis/ "building your business around Google or any other APIs"), and even suggested that Google offer a paid version of the API instead of just shutting down.

Today [Google introduced a paid version of the Google Translate API](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/08/paid-version-of-google-translate-api.html "Google introduced a paid version of the Google Translate API") that provides a programmatic interface to access Google's machine translation technology, supporting translations in over 50 languages.

The paid version of [Google Translate API](http://code.google.com/apis/language/ "Google Translate API") costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page), and allows up to 50 M chars/month.

Google has give a limit of 100K chars / day until 12/1/2011 for developers who had already created projects in the API console that used the Translate API version 2 prior to today.

It sounds like Google has decided on a solid business model that will keep the translation API alive, and allow developers to commercially integrate the service into their applications. Google Tranlsate API is now integrated into the [Google API Console](https://code.google.com/apis/console/ "Google API Console"), and is now one of four Google APIs that have pricing / billing frameworks to support them.

Google could have done a better PR job by deprecating the free version of the API at the same time as offering a paid version, but I think Google is trying to figure out how to manage and monetize their APIs just like the rest of us.