Amazon Translate pricing calculator
. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon Translate pricing works
What you pay for
- Per character translated: standard $15 per million, real-time Office documents $30 per million, Active Custom Translation $60 per million.
- Each target language is billed separately.
- Custom terminology and parallel data storage have no separate charge in standard use.
Common cost traps
- Translating into 10 languages costs 10x.
- Whitespace and markup characters count toward billing in many cases.
- Active Custom Translation is 4x standard.
Ways to reduce cost
- Cache translations and only re-translate changed strings.
- Use custom terminology (no extra charge) before paying for Active Custom Translation.
- Compare with a small Bedrock model for large, low-stakes volumes.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Legacy accounts: 2 M characters per month for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Translate?
Translate real-time and batch text and document translation and Active Custom Translation are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $30.00 | 333.3 mo. | 833.3 mo. | 3,333.3 mo. |
| Medium | $900.00 | 11.1 mo. | 27.8 mo. | 111.1 mo. |
| Large | $7,500.00 | 1.3 mo. | 3.3 mo. | 13.3 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
2 M characters per month of real-time text translation | Standard translation: 2,000,000 characters x $0.000015 = $30.00 | Total ~$30.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
50 M characters of text plus 5 M characters of Office documents | Standard translation: 50,000,000 characters x $0.000015 = $750.00; Office document translation: 5,000,000 characters x $0.00003 = $150.00 | Total ~$900.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
300 M characters batch + 50 M characters with Active Custom Translation | Batch translation: 300,000,000 characters x $0.000015 = $4,500.00; Active Custom Translation: 50,000,000 characters x $0.00006 = $3,000.00 | Total ~$7,500.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Translate pricing FAQ
How is Translate billed?
Per character of source text, for each target language.
What does 1 M characters cost?
$15 with standard real-time or batch translation in us-east-1.
Is there a free tier?
Legacy accounts get 2 M characters per month for 12 months.
Do credits cover Translate?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Treatment of whitespace/markup in character counts should be checked in the Translate documentation.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card translate (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/translate/pricing/ before publishing.