Billing concepts

Ponyglot charges for what costs money to produce: text sent to a translation engine. Everything that makes translation cheaper for you, such as the translation memory, is free to use.

Included volume

Each plan includes a number of characters per month. A character here is one source character sent to an engine, markup included. Characters that the translation memory covers, and repeats of a text within a job, aren’t sent to an engine and don’t count.

With Pro, each site has its own included volume. With Agency, Growth and Scale, the organization’s sites share one pool.

Usage months are calendar months in UTC. That’s easy to reason about and the same for everyone, also with yearly billing, where the included volume still applies per month.

A soft limit, with confirmation

Ponyglot doesn’t stop translating when the included volume is used up; a half-translated site helps no one. Characters beyond the included volume are billed after the month (see the pricing page).

To make sure this never happens by surprise, a job that would use characters beyond the included volume needs confirmation. So does any job with more than 100,000 billable characters, such as a first backfill. The API answers 409 with an estimate; the dashboard shows a confirmation page. Only after you confirm does the job start. Owners and admins also get an email at 80 % and 100 % of the included volume.

Estimates count what’s already queued

Jobs run one after another per site. If you request two jobs in quick succession, the second one’s estimate must account for the first, or both could pass the check against the same remaining volume. So estimates include reservations: the characters that queued and running jobs requested earlier are still expected to use.

A queued job can fail at start

A job’s cost is computed again when it starts. Usually nothing has changed. But if other jobs used more than expected in the meantime, the job may now cause more overage than you confirmed. Rather than charging you more than you agreed to, Ponyglot fails the job when it starts, with a message asking you to confirm again. Request the job again and confirm the new estimate.

Estimates before you commit

"estimate_only": true returns the segments, billable characters and cost of a job without creating it. Use it to plan a large backfill, or to show a cost preview in a connector.