- Free allowance
- The first 500,000 characters per month of language detection and text translation with the NMT model are free, applied as a $10 credit every month; the credit is shared by Cloud Translation - Basic and Advanced and does not roll over; above that the price is $20.00 per 1,000,000 characters
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quotafirst 500,000 characters per month free (a $10 monthly credit that does not roll over); $20.00 per 1,000,000 characters above it
- Evidence
- documented12 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-04checked 2026-11-03 (live); stale on 2026-12-04
| Free tier | the first 500,000 characters per month of language detection and text translation with the NMT model are free, applied as a $10 credit every month; the credit is shared by Cloud Translation - Basic and Advanced and does not roll over; above that the price is $20.00 per 1,000,000 characters unit mixed; metered on unstated; the true unit is source characters per month; the schema vocabulary has no character unit, so mixed is the nearest term. The credit does not apply to formatted document translations (DOCX, PPT and PDF are priced per page), and custom models and the translation LLM are priced separately with no free allowance on the page |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - volume-quota (binding) first 500,000 characters per month free (a $10 monthly credit that does not roll over); $20.00 per 1,000,000 characters above it source
- request-rate 6,000,000 characters per project per minute to the general model (v2 and v3); characters per day are unlimited source
- per-object-cap 30K code points per request on Advanced; 100K bytes on Basic; 5K characters recommended source
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| Binding | volume-quota the 500,000 characters per month free allowance runs out first; the card on the billing account is the identity gate |
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| Identity | card billing must be enabled for the project ('You must enable billing to use Cloud Translation.'); the Google Cloud Free Trial sign-up asks for a credit card or other payment method, and in some countries a bank account verification |
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| Egress | not published |
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| Per-object cap | recommended maximum 5K characters per request; Cloud Translation - Advanced accepts up to 30K code points per request and Basic up to 100K bytes; larger requests answer 400 INVALID_ARGUMENT; batch translation is the route for more content |
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| Retention | not applicable: a translation endpoint stores nothing for the caller |
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| Interface | rest |
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| Tooling | REST API (v2 Basic and v3 Advanced) at translation.googleapis.com, and Google client libraries; every call needs an API key or other credentials of a Google Cloud project with billing enabled and the Cloud Translation API enabled |
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| Composes with | the monthly free allowance is per billing account and shared by Basic and Advanced; the Free Trial credit is a separate, one-time offer |
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| Reliability | the free allowance is a monthly $10 credit: above 500,000 characters a month the usage is billed to the billing account at the standard rate, and the daily character quota is unlimited by default |
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| Notes | Supported languages: the NMT table on the language page runs from Abkhaz to Zulu, with translation between any pair listed. Character limit per request: 5K recommended, 30K code points on Advanced, 100K bytes on Basic. Keyless: no. The Free Trial credit and the always-free monthly allowance are separate offers. |
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| Evidence note | documented the free allowance, the price above it, the request limits, the billing requirement and the language list are quoted from the vendor's pricing, quota, setup, free-trial and language pages; the unauthenticated refusal is measured. |
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| Parsed numbers | |
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