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 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 source text you want to translate forms the basis for calculating your Linguistic credit usage. For example, 1 source character equals 1 credit on an x1 engine. The final credit consumption depends on the multiplier of the selected Linguistic engine.
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: Any context beyond the free allowance is charged at 25% of its character volume. This means that 1,000 additional context characters count as only 250 characters toward your billable workload before the engine multiplier is applied.
Engine multiplier
Each Linguistic engine has a multiplier based on what the model costs to run. We align these multipliers with our actual engine costs without adding a markup, keeping AI translation pricing transparent.
1 source character equals 1 Linguistic credit on an x1 engine. An x0.5 engine uses half a credit per source character, while an x2 engine uses two credits per source character.
Engine | Credit multiplier |
Anthropic |
|
Claude Haiku 4.5 | x2 |
Claude Opus 4.7 | x14 |
Claude Opus 5 | x14 |
Claude Sonnet 4.6 | x7 |
Claude Sonnet 5 | x6 |
|
|
Google Gemini |
|
Google Gemini 2.5 Flash | x1 |
Google Gemini 2.5 Pro | x3 |
Google Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | x1 |
Google Gemini 3.6 Flash | x3 |
|
|
Mistral |
|
Mistral Large 3 | x1 |
Mistral Medium 3.5 | x3 |
Mistral Small 4 | x0.5 |
|
|
OpenAI GPT-5 |
|
OpenAI GPT 5.4 | x6 |
OpenAI GPT 5.4 Mini | x2 |
OpenAI GPT 5.4 Nano | x0.5 |
OpenAI GPT 5.6 Luna | x0.5 |
OpenAI GPT 5.6 Sol | x9 |
OpenAI GPT 5.6 Terra | x5 |
The engine multiplier applies to the total translation workload, including your source text and any billable context beyond the free allowance. For example, translating 1,000 source characters on an x0.5 engine uses 500 Linguistic credits, while the same source text on an x2 engine uses 2,000 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. Only those engines that are turned on will be available for LINA.
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 Google Gemini 2.5 Flash (x1)
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: x1
Total consumption: 5,000 Linguistic credits
Example 2: Translation with large reference documents using Google Gemini 2.5 Pro (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 of 100,000 Linguistic credits costs €6. This price remains the same regardless of the engine you choose. The engine multiplier determines how many credits are consumed for your translation workload.
Controlling spending and setting budgets
To help you monitor costs and prevent unexpected overage, LingoHub allows Workspace Owners to set up custom budgets for additional Linguistic credit usage and CDN requests.
Learn how to configure spending caps and automated alerts in this guide on How to set up budgets.
Learn how to track current consumption or modify existing limits in this guide on How to manage budgets.
Need more help?
Couldn't find what you were looking for? We are here to help! Reach out to our team at [email protected], and we will gladly assist you.