Most WordPress translation tools bill you twice: once for the plugin licence, and again for the words you translate. Miss a renewal and the licence stops getting updates; go past the word or credit allowance and you top up. For a site that keeps publishing, that is a bill that never ends — and it grows with your content, not with your revenue.
TranslateRocket starts from a different premise: the plugin is free and has no paid tier at all, and if you want AI translation you bring your own provider key and pay that provider directly, at their price. This page explains exactly what that changes — and, just as importantly, when a paid plugin is still the better choice for you.
The two meters you are usually paying
Whatever tool you pick, the recurring cost usually comes from two separate meters running at once:
- The licence — an annual or monthly fee that keeps updates and support coming.
- The volume — words, characters or credits consumed when machine translation runs. This is the meter that surprises people, because it is counted per target language: the same page translated into five languages consumes the allowance five times.
Here is how the best-known options are structured. Figures checked in August 2026 — always confirm on the vendor’s own pricing page, because these change.
| Tool | What the free version really allows | Entry paid plan | Volume meter |
|---|---|---|---|
| TranslateRocket | Everything. Unlimited languages, unlimited strings. | There isn’t one. | None in the plugin. You pay your AI provider directly, or translate by hand for free. |
| TranslatePress | One extra language, so a bilingual site. Manual translation is unlimited. | €99/year (Personal) | AI words included with the plan; extra word packs sold separately. |
| WPML | No free version and no trial (there is a 30-day refund policy). | €39/year (Blog, first year) | Machine-translation credits: 2,000/month free, then prepaid or pay-as-you-go. |
| Weglot | 2,000 unique words, one language. Past the limit translations stop being served. | €15/month (Starter) | Unique words and monthly requests, both capped per plan. |
These are the vendors’ own list prices for their entry tiers, simplified for comparison: plans also differ in how many sites they cover, how many languages, and which features are included. Follow the links for the full current terms.
Bring your own key: paying the AI at cost
When a plugin sells you “AI words”, you are buying translation capacity resold with a margin. The alternative is to hold the relationship with the translation provider yourself: you create a key at DeepL, OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, paste it into the plugin, and whatever they charge is what you pay. Nothing sits in between.
For a normal site this is often free outright, because the providers’ own free tiers are generous:
- DeepL API Free — 500,000 characters a month at no cost.
- Google Cloud Translation — a monthly free character allowance, then per-character pricing.
- OpenAI, Gemini, Claude — pay per token, typically a fraction of a cent for a page.
This site is the worked example. It is published in 21 languages, and all of it was translated with a free DeepL key plus manual review: no licence, no word pack, nothing to renew.
What “free” means here, precisely
Worth being exact, because the word is used loosely in this market:
- No paid tier exists. There is no Pro version to upgrade to, so no feature is being held back in order to create one.
- Languages are unlimited — 36 ship built in, and you can add any language code you like.
- Strings are unlimited. Past roughly 20,000 the engine switches by itself to indexed per-page lookups, so memory stays flat instead of growing with your site.
- Donations are welcome and never required, and nothing is gated behind one.
Your translations stay yours
Recurring cost is only half of the lock-in question. The other half is where the translations live. Here they sit in your own WordPress database, in your own tables, and you can export the lot to CSV or to TMX — the standard translation-memory format that CAT tools and other systems read — whenever you want, without asking anyone.
That matters most on the day you decide to leave. A translation you cannot export is a translation you are renting.
When a paid plugin is genuinely the better choice
Being straight about this is more useful than a sales pitch. Pay for a plugin if:
- You need a support contract. TranslateRocket is supported on a best-effort basis by one developer. If your business needs guaranteed response times, buy them.
- You need a professional translation workflow — translator accounts, review queues, ordering human translation from inside the dashboard. WPML and TranslatePress have mature tooling there.
- You want translation to happen off your server entirely. Weglot’s proxy model means nothing runs inside your WordPress install, and some teams prefer that trade-off.
- You are already deep in an ecosystem — heavy WooCommerce multi-currency setups, or themes with certified integrations you depend on.
If what you actually need is your content readable in several languages, on clean per-language URLs with correct hreflang, and you would rather not carry a recurring bill for it — that is the case this plugin was built for.
Moving over from a paid plugin
If you already have translations elsewhere you do not start over. TranslateRocket imports from TranslatePress, Polylang and WPML, and from a Weglot CSV export. WPML’s translations are read straight from its database tables, so the import still works after WPML has been deactivated — which is exactly the situation when a licence has already lapsed.
Download TranslateRocket — free, forever
