Every LingoHub subscription plan includes a monthly capacity of linguistic credits tailored to your team's typical translation volume. However, because localization workloads change, you are never locked into a single fixed tier. Whether you stay within your plan's included limits or increase capacity, LingoHub adapts directly to your requirements while giving you complete visibility over your budget.
Here is everything you need to know about how your linguistic credits are calculated for AI translation, what drives your ongoing consumption, and how to keep costs entirely predictable.
Credit capacity by subscription plan
Your monthly linguistic credits limit depends on the plan you select, giving your team plenty of room to cover regular translation work:
Starter plan: Includes 100k linguistic credits per month (~15k words total).
Team plan: Includes 500k linguistic credits per month (~75k words total).
Pro plan: Includes 1 Mio. linguistic credits per month (~150k words total).
For the latest plan details and pricing, visit our pricing page. Enterprise plans include custom limits.
Understanding capacity usage
Every time you run an AI translation, you draw from your pool of linguistic credits. Depending on what you ask AI LINA to do and which engine you choose, a different amount of credits gets deducted from your balance. Three main factors determine how much you use:
Source text
The text you want to translate counts one-for-one. If you translate 1,000 characters of source text, AI LINA uses 1,000 credits.
Context (glossaries, style guides, instructions)
To provide tailored translations, AI LINA takes your supporting materials, such as glossaries, style guides, project and segment instructions, and labels into account.
Free allowance: For every translation request, you get a free allowance. This is either 5,000 characters or 2x your source text volume (whichever number is higher). For most day-to-day translation work, your context stays within this allowance and does not consume additional credits.
Going over the allowance: If you upload big reference files or use heavy document workloads like RAG, any character past your free allowance counts at a 75% discount. This means that 1,000 extra context characters cost only 250 credits.
Engine multiplier
More advanced AI models cost more to run, so they consume credits faster. The baseline price remains equivalent to €6 per 100,000 credits across all engines, but consumption scales as follows:
Engine | Credit multiplier | Per 1,000 source characters |
Claude Haiku 4.5, Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, Mistral Small 4, OpenAI GPT-5.4 Nano | x1 | 1,000 credits |
OpenAI GPT-5.4 Mini | x2 | 2,000 credits |
Claude Sonnet 4.6 | x3 | 3,000 credits |
Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, Mistral Large 3 | x4 | 4,000 credits |
Claude Opus 4.7, OpenAI GPT-5.4 | x6 | 6,000 credits |
The engine multiplier applies to the total translation workload, including your source text and any billable context beyond the free allowance.
For example, if a translation request contains 1,000 source characters and 500 chargeable context characters, the total workload is 1,500 characters. Using Claude Sonnet 4.6 (×3) would consume 4,500 linguistic credits.
Follow these steps to check which models are available and see their exact resource multipliers in LingoHub:
Head to the top navigation bar and click on AI.
From the left sidebar menu under the AI category, select Linguistic engines. Here you can see all available systems by provider. The toggle switch on the right side of each row lets you quickly turn specific engines on or off in your workspace.
AI translation costs: Examples
The following examples illustrate how different translation scenarios affect your linguistic credit consumption, from everyday translation tasks to projects that rely on large reference documents.
Example 1: Standard translation using Claude Sonnet 4.6 (x3)
You translate 5,000 source characters and provide 9,000 characters of context (glossary, style guide, and instructions).
Free allowance: max(5,000, 2 x 5,000) = 10,000 characters
Context is fully covered by the allowance
Billable context: 0 characters
Total workload: 5,000 characters
Engine multiplier: x3
Total consumption: 15,000 linguistic credits
Example 2: Translation with large reference documents using Claude Sonnet 4.6 (x3)
You translate 30,000 source characters and provide 500,000 characters of reference material.
Free allowance: max(5,000, 2 x 30,000) = 60,000 characters
Context above allowance: 500,000 − 60,000 = 440,000 characters
Billable context (25%): 110,000 characters
Total workload before engine multiplier: 30,000 + 110,000 = 140,000 characters
Engine multiplier: x3
Total consumption: 420,000 linguistic credits
What is always free?
Context inside the allowance: Regular use of glossaries, style guides, labels, project instructions, segment instructions, and translation memory (TM) does not consume additional credits.
Repeated text: If you translate the exact same text again (a cache hit) or if it perfectly matches a string already in your translation memory, it skips credit usage completely.
Bulk aggregation: Every translation request must have at least 100 characters to cover the baseline cost of an AI call. Bulk jobs are measured on their grand total, so individual minimums never affect them.
Additional linguistic credits
If your localization workload increases and you exceed your plan's included capacity, you can easily buy more credits. An additional package (100,000 linguistic credits) amounts to €6. While this rate remains constant, your choice of linguistic model, context volume, and source text determines how quickly your available credits are consumed.
Controlling your budgets and setting limits in LingoHub
To help you monitor costs and prevent unexpected overage, LingoHub lets you set up custom budgets for additional linguistic credit usage.
You can check your current usage and manage your budget at any time by navigating to your Workspace Settings (click your organization name in the top-left corner) and selecting Subscriptions & Billing under the left-hand Administration menu.
Clicking the Set budget button opens up your spending preferences. Within the setup window, you can configure the following options:
Budget amount per month: Define your maximum monthly spending allowance (ranging between €6 and €1,000). If you ever want to reset or completely remove your budget, simply set this amount to 0.
Receive budget threshold alerts: Toggling this checkbox ensures selected recipients receive automated warnings when your additional credit consumption hits 80% and 100% of your specified budget limit.
Once your project hits its budget cap, AI LINA automatically pauses all translation activity until you manually raise the limit or the billing month resets.
Your budget modifications take effect immediately. Any credit budget your team has already consumed will be handled as usual and added to your upcoming invoice. After saving your configuration, you can review your active spending tracker, total character credit limits, and upcoming payment schedules.
Good to know: Budgets only start tracking your usage from the exact moment you turn them on. They will not look back or count linguistic credits that your team used earlier in the month.
Awesome! You have finished this article about how AI translation pricing works in LingoHub. We hope that it helped you find answers to all your questions. Otherwise, contact our support, and we will gladly help!