When we started scaling our content to reach new international audiences, Weglot seemed like the obvious translation solution. Fast to implement, relatively accurate, and with minimal development overhead—it was nearly perfect. Until it wasn’t. As our traffic and published content grew, so did our word count. That’s when Weglot’s billing model hit us like a freight train.
TL;DR
We expanded heavily into multilingual content, and Weglot’s billing escalated rapidly due to its word-count based pricing. To reduce costs without sacrificing existing translations, I migrated our project to a more scalable open-source alternative. This plan preserved 100% of our translated content and eliminated word quotas. The migration wasn’t trivial, but it was completely worth it.
The Looming Cost Crisis
At first, Weglot’s model—charging based on the number of translated words and languages—was manageable. But once our blog started releasing multiple long-form articles per week in six languages, the word count ballooned into the hundreds of thousands. This meant:
- Paying thousands of dollars monthly
- Manually pruning older content to stay within quotas
- Risking sudden overage bills
Weglot’s per-language pricing quickly became a bottleneck for our growth. We weren’t just translating existing posts—we were scaling content production aggressively: thought leadership, SEO blogs, product announcements, documentation, case studies, and more across EN, DE, FR, ES, IT, and JP.
The translation volume exploded. Weglot’s pricing followed right behind it.
Evaluating the Options
My goal was clear: escape the Weglot pricing trap without losing translation accuracy, SEO value, or operational consistency. That meant evaluating multiple options:
- Stick with Weglot and limit growth? Not viable.
- Build a custom translation gateway? Too much dev time.
- Use another commercial platform? Same pricing issues.
Ultimately, I went with a full self-hosted migration using an open-source i18n framework and Translation Memory. Our translations would be persistent, accessible, and editable—without a pricing structure tied to how much we wrote.
The Migration Plan
Here’s the migration framework I followed to move away from Weglot while securing our historic translations and paving a scalable path forward:
Step 1: Audit and Backup
I started by exporting all existing translations from Weglot. Thankfully, Weglot allows you to download translations in .CSV format through its dashboard. I set up a simple Python script to batch download these for every language.
Key things I looked for:
- How many translations existed per URL?
- Which content types consumed the most words?
- Accuracy of AI vs manually edited segments
Surprisingly, a large volume of our costs came from translations on dynamic pages—things like user reviews, FAQs, and support documentation that were updated frequently.
Step 2: Choose a Replacement Stack
After experimenting with several solutions, I chose a combination of:
- Next.js internationalized routing
- i18next and locize integration for front-end translate keys
- Amazon Translate for future translations (pay-per-use model)
- Translation Memory via PhraseApp TMX file import
This approach mimics Weglot’s functionality, but grants full control over content, performance, and—most importantly—cost structure.
Step 3: Import Legacy Translations
This was the most nuanced part. I used a script to ingest Weglot-exported .CSV files and convert them into a TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) file. This allowed me to preserve all existing translations—even ones manually edited by our team—and load them into PhraseApp’s TM system.
By doing this:
- We retained translation consistency
- Didn’t need to re-pay to re-translate already published content
- Preserved SEO performance with consistent multilingual slugs and meta tags
This datastore let us pre-populate all pages with known translations without relying on runtime translation APIs.
Implementation Challenges
Like any technical project, the devil was in the details. Here were the top three challenges we faced:
- Dynamic content complexity — Pages with user-generated content required conditional translation logic and fallback flows.
- SEO continuity — We meticulously mirrored old translated URL paths to preserve backlinks and rankings.
- CMS integration — We had to customize our CMS pipeline to mark translatable fields, including those nested in rich text blocks.
Over time, we wrote a set of internal scripts to handle automatic translation of new content, compare variants, and submit diffs to editors for proofreading. This gave us far more control than Weglot ever could—and without fear of random rate hikes.
Key Benefits After Migration
Within 8 weeks of completing the migration, we had:
- Reduced translation costs by 92% over three months
- Scaled content into 8 languages without cost penalties
- Maintained SEO traffic and rankings globally
- Gained more translation quality control and history tracking
Best Practices I Recommend
If you’re planning your own escape from Weglot or a similar word-count-billed translation platform, here are my top takeaways:
- Export everything first: Never begin the migration before you have all translations saved and tested locally.
- Test with staging environments: Review routing, translation memory, and SEO performance before switching live domains.
- Use translation memory properly: Whether via PhraseApp, Lokalise, or an in-house system, this is your leverage against redundancy.
- Get localization editors to help: Automated translations can only go so far. Native-speaking editors elevated our final quality.
Conclusion: It’s About Control
Weglot is a superb product—when you’re just starting. But when scale and content volume grow beyond early-stage needs, it becomes opaque, costly, and dangerously limiting. By migrating to a system we could control, we turned localization from a liability into a competitive advantage.
We now publish faster, reach more global users, and spend a fraction of what we used to. All without giving up on translation quality or SEO competitiveness.
Don’t let your translation budget grow faster than your traffic. Plan your escape while you still can.
