Amazon Translate Pricing Calculator & Complete Cost Guide
Interactive Amazon Translate pricing calculator. Compare standard vs custom translation costs, understand the legacy free tier limits, and optimize your translation spending.
Pricing TLDR
- • New accounts: no per-service free tier ($200 credits, then standard rates)
- • Legacy free tier (accounts before July 15, 2025): 2M chars/mo for 12 months, text/batch only
- • Standard translation: $15 per million characters (text + batch)
- • Document translation: $15/M (basic) or $30/M (Office with formatting)
- • Custom translation: $60/M chars (legacy: 500K/mo free for first 2 months)
Official pricing:
AWSAmazon Translate Pricing Calculator
Quick Examples:
Characters per month
0
10M
Total characters to translate per month (including spaces and punctuation)
Target languages
1
10
Number of languages to translate into (Amazon Translate supports 75+ languages)
Operation type
Estimated Monthly Cost
Accounts created before July 15, 2025 only; new accounts pay standard rates
$15.00
Total characters
1,000,000
Price per character
$0.000015
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About Amazon Translate
What is Amazon Translate?
Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. It uses advanced deep learning models to provide more accurate and natural-sounding translations compared to traditional statistical methods. With support for 75+ languages, Amazon Translate enables you to translate text between any language pair in its catalog.
- 75+ Supported Languages: Translate between any language pair including Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and more with thousands of language combinations
- Custom Terminology: Ensure consistent translation of brand names, product names, and industry-specific terms at no additional cost with up to 10,000 terms per file
- Active Custom Translation: Train custom ML models on your domain-specific content for improved accuracy in specialized fields like medical, legal, or technical documentation
When to Use Amazon Translate
Amazon Translate is ideal for businesses that need to localize content at scale, provide multilingual customer support, or process international documents. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Lambda, S3, and Comprehend for complete translation workflows.
Ideal for
- E-commerce product catalog localization to multiple languages
- Real-time multilingual customer support chat translation
- Batch document translation with formatting preservation
- Website and mobile app content localization
- Processing international documents with custom terminology
- Content moderation and analysis across languages
Not ideal for
- Professional translation requiring human review and certification
- Legal contracts where minor translation errors have major consequences
- Creative content where tone and cultural nuance are critical
- Real-time video subtitle generation (use Amazon Transcribe + Translate)
Amazon Translate Free Tier
12-month · legacy accounts
A 12-month allowance, only for accounts created before July 15, 2025.
2M
characters / month
12 months from first use; Active Custom Translation adds 500K chars/mo for 2 months
New accounts · since July 2025
The 2-million-characters/month tier is legacy-only (accounts before July 15, 2025, for 12 months). New accounts use the $200 credit pool, then pay $15 per million characters.
Watch out for
- Real-time document translation has no free tier
- Active Custom Translation is free for only 2 months, not 12
Full service-by-service breakdown, the July 2025 changes, and the common billing traps in the AWS Free Tier reference.
Amazon Translate Pricing Breakdown
Pricing Tiers by Operation Type
Operation Type
TranslateText
Price per Million Characters
$15.00
Use Case
Real-time API translation
Operation Type
TranslateDocument (Basic)
Price per Million Characters
$15.00
Use Case
txt, html, xml files
Operation Type
TranslateDocument (Office)
Price per Million Characters
$30.00
Use Case
docx, pptx, xlsx with formatting
Operation Type
TextTranslationJob
Price per Million Characters
$15.00
Use Case
Batch processing jobs
Operation Type
ActiveCustomTranslationJob
Price per Million Characters
$60.00
Use Case
Custom ML model translation
Character count includes all UTF-8 characters: letters, spaces, punctuation, and special characters
Character Counting Rules
Understanding how Amazon Translate counts characters is critical for accurate cost estimation. All text elements count toward billing, including whitespace and special characters.
What Counts
All UTF-8 characters including letters, spaces, tabs, newlines, punctuation, and special characters. Emojis count as 2-4 characters depending on encoding.
What Doesn't Count
HTML/XML tags are excluded when using appropriate format hints. API request metadata and headers do not count toward character billing.
Examples
"Hello world" = 11 characters (including space). "Hello world!" = 12 characters.
Optimization
Preprocess text to remove unnecessary whitespace and normalize formatting. For documents with heavy formatting, savings can reach 10-20%.
Regional Availability
Amazon Translate has uniform pricing across all regions, simplifying cost planning for global deployments. However, Active Custom Translation has limited regional availability.
Pricing Uniformity
No price variation between regions (unlike EC2, RDS). Whether you use us-east-1 or ap-northeast-1, costs are identical.
Active Custom Translation Regions
Custom ML models only available in us-east-1, us-west-2, and eu-west-1. Applications in other regions must send data cross-region.
Data Transfer Costs
Cross-region translation incurs standard AWS data transfer fees. For 1M characters (~1MB), data transfer is negligible ($0.09).
Deployment Strategy
Choose regions based on latency to users and compliance requirements, not cost. No additional charges for multi-region deployments.
Real-World Amazon Translate Pricing Examples
E-commerce Product Catalog
$187.50/month
• 12.5M characters monthly
• 5 target languages
• Custom brand terms
Translate 10,000 product descriptions to 5 languages
Real-Time Customer Support
$225/month
• 15M characters monthly
• Two-way translation
• Real-time API calls
Multilingual chat translation for customer service
Legal Document Translation
$270 (once)
• 9M characters
• Keeps Office format
• 3 target languages
Translate 100 contracts maintaining Office formatting
Medical Device Documentation
$1,800 (once)
• 30M characters
• Custom ML model
• Domain-specific accuracy
Specialized translation with Active Custom Translation
8 Amazon Translate Cost Optimization Tips
Use the Legacy Free Tier (Pre-July 2025 Accounts)
If your AWS account was created before July 15, 2025, you get a legacy free tier: 2 million characters per month FREE for standard text translation (TranslateText and batch jobs only, NOT document translation) for 12 months, plus 500K characters for Active Custom Translation in the first 2 months. This can save up to $30/month ($360 over 12 months) for standard translation plus $30 for custom. New accounts (created on or after July 15, 2025) don't get this tier; they receive up to $200 in AWS credits and then pay standard rates ($15/million). If you have a legacy account, plan major text translation projects during this period and avoid document translation APIs to maximize savings.
Avoid Office Format Unless Necessary
TranslateDocument Office files (docx, pptx, xlsx) cost $30 per million characters, double the standard $15 rate. If you don't need formatting preservation, extract text first and use standard translation to cut costs by 50%. For 10M characters, that's $150 savings.
Use Custom Terminology Instead of Custom Models
Custom terminology is FREE and ensures consistent translation of brand names, product terms, and industry jargon. Active Custom Translation costs 4x more ($60 vs $15 per million characters). Only upgrade to custom models when accuracy requirements justify the 300% premium.
Implement Translation Caching
Cache frequently translated phrases, UI strings, and common customer queries. A simple caching layer can reduce API calls by 30-50% for applications with repetitive content. For 1M characters monthly, that's $4.50-$7.50 saved.
Optimize Character Count
Whitespace, punctuation, and formatting characters all count toward billing. Preprocess text to remove unnecessary whitespace, normalize formatting, and strip HTML tags (Amazon Translate ignores them when you set format hints). For documents with heavy formatting, savings can reach 10-20%.
Batch Processing for High Volumes
While batch pricing equals real-time pricing ($15/M chars), TextTranslationJob offers better throughput and is designed for large volumes. Use batch processing for non-time-sensitive workloads to avoid API throttling and simplify retry logic. No cost savings, but better reliability.
Detect Language Client-Side When Possible
Amazon Comprehend's language detection costs $0.0001 per 100 characters, adding 6.7% overhead if used for every request. When source language is known (user selection, metadata), skip detection to avoid this extra charge. For 10M characters, save $10/month.
Monitor Translation Costs in Real-Time
Track Amazon Translate spending across all operations and regions with CostGoat. Get instant alerts when translation costs spike unexpectedly, identify which operations are consuming budget (Office docs vs standard), and catch accidental high-volume translation loops before they drain your budget.
Start Tracking Your AWS Spending
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Amazon Translate Pricing FAQ
Common questions about Amazon Translate costs, character pricing, and free tier
