How to translate your website.
There are four ways to do it, and they cost very different amounts. Two of the four are not us, and this page says which.
The short answer
One market, under ten pages, rarely changes? Translate it once by hand and forget about it. Site changes weekly, or you're entering a market you plan to stay in? You want translations that maintain themselves, which is what this category of software does. Words with legal or medical risk? Hire a certified translator and keep a model away from them.
Website translation cost: four ways, from cheap to certified.
The short version in numbers: a translator bills per word, and again every time the page changes; a browser widget costs little or nothing and ranks nowhere; software in this category is a monthly fee, and ours is free up to 5,000 stored words and from 199 kr a month after that; your own developers cost engineering time for as long as the site lives.
| Approach | What it costs | Fits when |
|---|---|---|
| A professional translator, once | Per word, and again every time the page changes | A small site that does not change, or copy where a mistake is expensive |
| A browser plugin or auto-translate widget | Little or nothing | You want readers, not rankings — Google indexes one language |
| Translation software (this category) | A monthly fee, usually by volume or by seat | The site changes and you want it to stay translated without anyone remembering to |
| Your developers, by hand, in the codebase | Engineering time, forever | You already have an i18n setup and only need the words |
How much does it cost to translate a website?
It depends on which of the four you buy, and they are not close together. A professional translator is billed per word and billed again every time the page changes, so the cost follows how often you publish rather than how big the site is. A browser widget is close to free and ranks nowhere. Your own developers are engineering time for as long as the site lives. Translation software is a monthly fee: ours is free up to 5,000 stored words, 199 kr a month for 25,000 with the AI included, or the same 199 kr a month for no word limit at all if you bring your own AI key and pay that provider yourself. It is counted on words stored, never on seats, pageviews, or how many languages you run.
Website localization cost is the same question asked with the American spelling, and it has the same answer, with one addition: localisation usually means the dates, currencies and formats around the words as well. Those live in your own code, so no tool in this category prices them.
How to cut website translation costs, and the part of the budget nobody counts
The first bill is not the expensive one. A site that changes gets retranslated, and paying per word means paying again for a page where somebody fixed one sentence. That is where a translation budget goes.
So the saving is not a cheaper rate. It is translating less: keep what you have, retranslate only the sentences whose source changed, and never pay twice for a sentence that did not move. That is what software in this category is for. It is why a monthly fee beats per-word pricing on a site that publishes often, and loses to it on a brochure site that never changes. If your site is the second kind, hire a translator once.
What does BeMyWords cost?
Free to start: 5,000 words stored, 1 site, no card. Paid tiers start at 199 kr a month, or 1 990 kr for a year. They count the words you store, the original plus each translation of it, and never people, pageviews or a cap on how many languages you run. Bring your own AI key and it is 199 kr a month flat with no word limit.
Which tier that is depends on how many words your site holds. Paste your address and we read it and tell you.
Every tier, and what it holds Size your siteReadable and findable are different purchases.
Most people asking how to translate their website mean two things at once: that a visitor from Germany can read it, and that a customer in Germany can find it. Those need different machinery, and the cheap options only do the first.
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01
Being readable is easy
Plugins, widgets and script-based tools all swap the words in the browser. The visitor is already on your page, so that's the whole job.
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02
Being findable needs a URL
For Google to rank your German page, that page needs its own address a crawler can fetch. One URL that changes language in the browser is one page, in one language, as far as Google is concerned.
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03
So ask which one you are buying
It's a fair question to put to any vendor, us included: does this give me a separate, crawlable page per language on my kind of site? Ask it before you pay. The answer changes depending on how your site is built.
Where we fit, and where we do not.
If your site has a build
Astro, Rails, Next.js, Vue or anything with a deploy step: we write real translated files into it. Real pages at real addresses, and nothing depends on us once they are built.
If your site is on a hosted builder
One script tag translates it for your visitors. There is no page per language, so your site becomes readable but not findable. That is a real limit.
If the words carry risk
Contracts, medical copy, anything with liability attached: use a certified translator. Skiwo runs a translation service, and that is where we would send you for those words.
Start with one language and see.
Free to start, no card. If one of the other three answers was the right one, you will know by this afternoon.
Start free