Weglot, WPML and TranslatePress all sell AI translation of your WordPress site as a yearly plan sized by words and languages. The model call behind it costs a few cents per thousand words. AI Translate BYOK makes that call with your own API key: you pay your AI provider once for the words you translate, and nothing per year.
| AI Translate BYOK | Weglot | WPML | TranslatePress | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free plugin; full version $27.99 once. AI cost paid to your provider | Yearly plan by words × languages ($170–$7,690/yr) | Yearly licence (€39–€199) + AI words: 22,500 or 45,000 included, then credits | Yearly licence with AI words included (€99–€349/yr, 50K–500K words) |
| 30,000 words × 3 languages | ~$0.25 once (gpt-4o-mini) or ~$2 (Claude Haiku 4.5) | $870/yr (Pro) | €99/yr + credits for 67,500 words | €199/yr (Business) |
| Where your content goes | Straight from your site to the AI provider you chose | Weglot's servers | WPML's translation service | TranslatePress AI service |
| Which AI | Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint: OpenAI, Claude, OpenRouter, local models | Their choice | Their choice | Their choice |
| Review before publishing | Every translation is a draft | Published live, edit afterwards | Translation editor | Visual editor |
| If you stop paying | Translations are normal WordPress posts; they stay | Translated pages stop being served | Existing translations stay; no updates or new AI words | Existing translations stay; no new AI words |
| Language switcher / URL structure | Uses Polylang or WPML if you have them (full version links translations) | Built in | Built in | Built in |
If you want a hosted service to manage the language switcher, URLs and translation of theme strings with no setup, Weglot and TranslatePress do that out of the box. AI Translate BYOK translates your content — posts, pages and, in the full version, SEO fields and categories — and leaves language routing to Polylang or WPML, which many sites already run.
Point by point, with what Weglot does better: AI Translate BYOK vs Weglot.
The WordPress translation cost calculator picks the cheapest plan of each vendor for your word count and languages and shows the one-off API cost next to it.
Prices from the vendors' public pages on 29 September 2026 (Weglot, WPML, TranslatePress, OpenAI, Claude), before tax. API estimates assume 1.4 input and 2 output tokens per word per language, doubled for prompts and re-runs. Weglot, WPML and TranslatePress are trademarks of their owners; this page isn't affiliated with them.