What website translation actually costs

It depends entirely on which of three models you buy. An agency charges per source word per language, so the cost scales with your page count and repeats whenever you publish. Building a separate site per language costs development time up front and then multiplies your maintenance forever. A translation layer is a monthly subscription based on content volume — Proxylang is free for your first 2,000 words, $15 a month for 20,000 words in 2 languages, and $39 a month for 100,000 words in 3 languages.

Translating is cheaper in almost every case, and the gap widens over time. A second site is not a one-off build: it is a second content system, a second publishing routine, and a second thing to forget to update. The case for a separate site is not cost — it is when the offering itself differs by market, with different products, prices or a different legal entity.

Because words are what gets translated, and it is the only unit that scales with the actual work. The question worth asking is not whether a service charges per word but whether it charges for the same word twice. Proxylang stores each translated word permanently, so a page you translated last year costs nothing to keep serving this year. Services that re-meter monthly charge you again for content that has not changed.

Start on a free tier and find out what your site actually costs before committing. Proxylang translates your first 2,000 words with no card, which is enough to translate a few real pages and read them. If you want a number before you start, run your site through the word counter — the count it gives you is the figure every per-word quote you receive will be based on.

The three that catch people out are: content published after the quote, which an agency has to re-quote for; language caps, where a plan includes words but only one or two languages; and monthly re-metering of words you have already paid to translate. Compare those three lines rather than the headline price. Our comparison of what each service includes was last checked in July 2026.

Adding a language uses more of your word allowance, because the same source content is translated again into the new language, and your plan sets how many languages you can run at once. It is not a separate purchase or a new project fee. Moving from Lite to Start takes you from 2 languages to 3.