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I understand that with a DeepL API Free plan the user can request translation of 500,000 characters a month for free. With the API Pro plan, an unlimited amount of characters can be translated; this requires paying a monthly subscription fee as well as a certain amount of money per every character that exceeds the 500,000 free characters.

I'm not entirely clear on what will happen if, using the DeepL API Free plan, the sum of translation queries exceeds the free contingent.

According to the DeepL help center:

For DeepL API Free:

With our limited API plan, you can translate up to 500,000 characters per month for free. > To translate more, you can upgrade to DeepL API Pro at any time.

For DeepL API Pro:

In addition to the monthly base price of €4.99, the DeepL API Pro subscription plan is billed according to the number of characters sent to DeepL's servers in API requests, charged at the exact amount of characters translated during the billing period. We charge €0.00002 per translated character.

Note that it does not explicitly state what happens if the free contingent is exceeded in the API Free plan.

In the API documentation, there is a specific error code that seems related to the contingent:

HTTP 456: quota exceeded. The translation limit of your account has been reached. Consider upgrading your subscription.

I also discovered this passage in the terms and conditions referring to Products with a maximum monthly usage cap, which I assume the API Free plan falls under:

10.7 For Products with a maximum monthly usage cap, DeepL will only allow the contracted number of characters (as described in the Service Specification) to be translated within a billing period. Once the monthly usage limit is reached, Customer will no longer be able to use the Products, unless a Product with a higher number of characters has been purchased (if available).

Given those pieces of information, I assume that any query that would lead to breaking the 500,000 character limit will simply fail and return error code 456.

Can anyone with experience with the DeepL API confirm or deny this, or point me to documentation that will clarify this point more?

The main reason I'm being this pedantic is that even for the API Free plan, customers have to give a credit card number. Unforeseen deductions could have severe consequences.

waldrumpus
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1 Answers1

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If you translate 500000 or more characters, you will receive error code 456 for each subsequent translation until the end of the current period. In he next period you will get 500000 characters for free again. Sometimes you manage to translate more characters until the lock takes effect, but DeepL will not charge you for the extra characters in any case.

clemens
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