Free vs Paid Translation Tools: What You Actually Need
A decision framework, not a tool roundup — and it opens by admitting you can run a professional localization pipeline for zero euros indefinitely. Covers the four kinds of free (licence, free tier, free-because-of-who-you-are, and free-because-you-are-paying-another-way) and why only the first is structurally permanent; a full inventory of localization software that is genuinely free and genuinely good, including the competition; the only five things paying ever buys — time, capacity, coordination, assurance, continuity — and why translation quality is not among them, since the engine does that work for free and paid tools alike. Then the break-even arithmetic with a worked example across four paths and the case where multiplying by twelve lies to you, the six shapes a free tier takes when it ends and why the language count crosses quotas long before growth does, the honest hidden costs on both sides, a category-by-category table showing most teams should pay for exactly one of five purchases, four concrete signals to act on, and a straight description of our own 2,000-character free tier as a trial rather than a workshop.