What it costs us to translate a menu
The Better Translate team ·
A two-week trip costs us about 29 cents to serve. The subscription is $23.99 a year.
Both of those numbers are real and we would rather print them than have you guess.
The measured numbers
These are measured from real traffic, not estimated from a price list. A menu page is roughly
forty times the cost of a spoken turn, because a menu is a wall of text read in one go and a turn
is a sentence.
What a real trip costs
Work it forward. A two-week trip where you photograph a menu most days and hold a few dozen
conversations lands around 29 cents of our cost. A heavy user who translates every
meal for a month is still under a dollar.
The transcription costs us nothing at all, because it happens on your phone rather than on a
server we pay for. That is a privacy decision that happens to also be a cost decision, and we are
not going to pretend the second part did not occur to us.
Why the year is $23.99 and the week is $0.99
The year is under half the weekly rate. That is deliberate, and it is not a discount in the
usual sense.
A week at 99 cents is an impulse. Somebody standing outside a restaurant in a city they do not
speak the language of will spend 99 cents without thinking about it, use the app for nine days, and
never think about it again. That is a completely reasonable way to use this, and it is priced to be
one.
A year is a decision, so it is priced like a decision: cheaper per week by a lot, for someone who
already knows they travel.
We considered a monthly plan at $3.99 and dropped it. It made the page a three-row comparison
table, and asking somebody standing in a restaurant to do arithmetic is a bad thing to do to them.
The only question worth asking is how long, not how many tiers.
Why print any of this
Because the alternative is that you assume. Subscription apps mostly do not show their costs, and
the gap between $23.99 and 29 cents looks worse in the dark than it does in the light. What you are
paying for is the app existing at all: the eval harness, the five test menus, the App Store
compliance, the year of small fixes. The per-request cost is genuinely the cheap part.
If that maths makes you want the weekly instead of the year, take the weekly. It is right there
on the same screen.