Amazon Translate

AWS machine translation API priced at $15 per million characters, with a 2 million character monthly free tier for the first 12 months

As of 1 September 2026, Amazon Translate is free to use. Amazon’s translation service undercuts Google’s standard rate at $15 per million characters and offers the largest free allowance of the three major cloud APIs, 2 million characters a month, but only for a customer’s first year on AWS. Softwr lists it under Translation. Amazon Translate is made by Amazon Web Services, Inc., available on Web.

Visit siteVisit Amazon Translate

Overview

What Amazon Translate does

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service available through the AWS console and SDKs, supporting text, real-time and batch document translation, and Active Custom Translation for improving output using customer-supplied parallel data. Unlike Google Translate or Microsoft Translator, there is no separate consumer-facing app or website; it exists entirely as infrastructure for developers to call from their own applications. On price, Amazon undercuts Google’s $20 per million character standard rate at $15 per million characters for standard text translation, and its free tier is the most generous of the three at 2 million characters per month, though that allowance only applies for the customer’s first 12 months on the service, after which standard pricing applies to all usage. Document translation of Office file formats costs double the standard rate at $30 per million characters, and Active Custom Translation, which uses customer data to steer output, costs $60 per million characters with its own separate limited-time free allowance. Buyers are AWS-native development teams who want translation billed and managed through the same console as their other infrastructure. The trade-off is that the generous free tier is time-limited to the first year, so a project’s translation costs jump materially in year two even with no change in usage, a fact that is easy to miss when budgeting a new integration around the attractive introductory numbers.

What people use it for

An AWS-native development team wanting translation billed through the same console as the rest of their infrastructure
A new AWS customer running a translation-heavy pilot project inside the generous first-year 2 million character monthly free tier
A team building a translation pipeline directly integrated with S3 and Lambda for document processing
A business wanting formality-adjusted output for specific language pairs in customer-facing content

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Amazon Translate.

The generous 2 million character monthly free tier applies only for a customer’s first 12 months on AWS, so translation costs step up materially in year two with no change in usage.
There is no consumer-facing app or website, so it is unusable for casual personal translation the way Google Translate or Microsoft Translator are.
Document translation of Office files costs double the standard per-character rate, which is easy to underestimate when budgeting a document-heavy project.
Active Custom Translation, the tool for improving output with domain-specific data, costs four times the standard rate at $60 per million characters.
As with all major MT APIs, output for low-resource languages and specialised terminology often still needs human review, so it does not substitute for a human translation service on customer-facing or legally sensitive content.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Amazon Translate

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Amazon Translatevs
Google Translate
Google Translate: If you want a recurring, non-expiring free monthly allowance rather than one limited to your first year
Amazon Translatevs
Microsoft Translator
Microsoft Translator: If you want the lowest standard per-character rate among the three major cloud translation APIs

Pricing

What Amazon Translate costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Standard text translation

$15 /mo

$15 per million characters
2 million characters per month free for the first 12 months on AWS

Document translation (Office files)

$30 /mo

$30 per million characters, double the standard rate

Real-time document translation

$15 /mo

Text and HTML documents, no free tier

Active Custom Translation

$60 /mo

$60 per million characters
500,000 characters per month free for the first 2 months

Capabilities

Features

Text translation API
Real-time and batch translation across 75+ languages, billed per character
Document translation
Translation of Office file formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), billed at double the standard rate
Active Custom Translation
Output steering using customer-supplied parallel text, billed at a premium rate
Real-time document translation
Text and HTML document translation with no free tier
Formality control
Adjustable formality level output for supported language pairs
AWS-native integration
Direct integration with S3, Lambda and other AWS services for translation pipelines

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

How generous is the free tier really?

2 million characters per month, the largest of the three major cloud APIs, but only for the first 12 months after which standard per-character pricing applies to everything.

Is there a consumer app like Google Translate?

No, Amazon Translate is a developer API only, accessed through the AWS console and SDKs, with no separate public-facing app.

How much does document translation cost compared to text?

Double the standard rate, at $30 per million characters for Office file formats.

Keep looking

Where to go from Amazon Translate

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Amazon Translate, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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