Weglot Pricing Explained: When Per-Word Billing Hurts

Weglot deserves its reputation for effortless onboarding. This piece is about the other half of the story: how word-tier SaaS pricing behaves as sites grow.

The multiplication people miss

Word counts feel abstract until multiplied. Every page, menu, footer and product string counts, per language. Growth in content or markets moves you up tiers; the meter never sleeps. This is the word-count tier model working as designed — for the vendor.

The wholesale alternative, with numbers

Machine translation is a commodity: ~$20 per million characters from Google directly. 60,000 words ≈ 360K characters ≈ $7.20 once (often $0 within the free tier), cached forever in your own database. The recurring fee worth paying is for software features — not for words.

Fair credit

Weglot remains a fine choice for non-WordPress platforms and for teams who value its managed dashboard above cost and data ownership. On WordPress, where a plugin can do the serving, the economics tilt hard the other way.