When you create an account, you receive 5,000 characters for free (one-time). This lets you test the API without any payment. Once you run out, you can buy additional credits at $0.50 per 100,000 characters. There are no monthly subscriptions or commitments — you only pay for what you use, when you use it.
flowLingua supports 100+ languages across all major language families. Because we use LLMs as the translation engine, we don't need separate models for each language pair. If the underlying LLM understands a language, flowLingua can translate from and to it. This is a key advantage over traditional NMT systems that require trained models per pair.
Traditional translation APIs (DeepL, Google Translate, AWS Translate) use Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models — one model per language pair. This means: (1) limited language coverage, (2) inconsistent quality across pairs, (3) higher costs due to infrastructure. flowLingua uses LLMs as the translation engine, which gives: better context awareness, native support for all language pairs, and 5-10x lower cost thanks to efficient LLM providers like DeepSeek.
Yes! flowLingua is open-source under the MIT license. You can self-host it using Docker or Docker Compose. Running your own instance means complete control over your data, no rate limits, and no external dependencies. See the GitHub repository for instructions.
On the cloud version, your translated text is processed temporarily and is never stored, logged, or used for training. We do not share your data with third parties. In self-hosted mode, your data never leaves your own infrastructure — complete privacy.
We use a simple JSON API. POST to /translate with fields q (text), source (language code), and target (language code). We also support batch translation (send an array of texts) and HTML-preserving translation. The API is compatible with the LibreTranslate ecosystem, so existing tools work out of the box.
Absolutely. flowLingua is MIT-licensed and designed for commercial use. Whether you're building a SaaS product, an e-commerce site, or an internal tool, you can use it freely. For the managed cloud version, the pay-per-use pricing scales with your usage.