Self-hosted vs. commercial translation APIs: what's the difference?
When you type a sentence into most "free" online translators, that text is usually sent over the internet to a commercial machine translation API — Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, DeepL, or similar — which does the actual translation and sends the result back. The website you're on is often just a thin frontend calling someone else's paid API in the background.
Traduck works differently. We run our own open-source translation model on our own server. There's no outbound call to a third-party translation vendor anywhere in the request path — the model that produces your translation is the same one our infrastructure is running.
Why does this matter?
Data path. With a third-party API in the loop, your text crosses at least two companies' infrastructure: ours, and theirs. With a self-hosted model, it only crosses ours. That's a smaller, more auditable surface for a sentence you might not want logged by a company you've never dealt with directly.
Pricing structure. Commercial translation APIs typically bill per character, which is why so many "free" translation websites cap you tightly or push you toward a paid tier fast — they're passing through metered costs. Traduck's fixed-cost infrastructure means we can offer a flat monthly request quota instead of a running per-character bill.
Language coverage. Our translation model was specifically chosen to improve translation quality for lower-resource languages that commercial engines have historically deprioritized in favor of the handful of languages with the most commercial demand. That's part of why we support languages like Slovenian, Estonian, and Vietnamese alongside the more common ones.
The honest trade-off
We're not going to claim our engine beats every commercial competitor on every language pair — that would be exactly the kind of unverifiable marketing claim we'd rather not make. What we can tell you concretely is what infrastructure your text touches, because we're the ones running all of it. If translation quality on a specific language pair isn't meeting your expectations, tell us — that feedback directly informs what we prioritize.
Try it
The translator on our homepage runs this exact self-hosted engine. No account needed for a quick test; see the pricing page for the daily and monthly quotas.