from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a fast, accurate translation API for 1/30th the price of Google

by nbened on 11/29/23, 2:49 PM with 14 comments

Hey HN,

I built an alternative to Google translate that's fast, accurate, and 1/30th the price. 20+ supported languages, not billed until 100k tokens, and already used thousands of times with real language learning users.

The landing page has a demo for you to test performance yourself for free with no card required. (Also landing page says 1/13 the price because had to account for all 3 big names, with varying prices each).

I built this as a workaround for my language learning startup, and it was perfect at a fraction of the cost. Hopefully it can help other devs in accessibility and language learning apps.

Thanks,

  • by nbened on 11/29/23, 2:53 PM

    Also, please hit me with any feedback, specifically for the documentation clarity and call quality.

    My goal is to keep fundamental utilities and accessibility tools like translation services in the hands of small creators rather than some mega corporation, so I'm open to any improvement that can make that a reality.

    Nic

  • by lpellegr on 11/30/23, 12:22 AM

    The idea is great but you will never compete with a solution like Google translate: one simple reason is that Google Translate is highly specialized and optimized. Did you try to compare the processing time?

    Running an opensource AI model to perform translation may help and work in some cases but to be honest this has also a lot of limitations. The first being processing time and the second languages support. I am not even considering accuracy.

  • by pierotofy on 11/29/23, 10:16 PM

    Nice project!

    A few questions/suggestions:

    - It's not clear what the character limit would be if one was to sign-up. - What does "context-driven translations for higher accuracy" mean? - 35 characters are quite short for testing the translation of a complete sentence. Is there a reason for using such a short character length?

  • by quickthrower2 on 11/29/23, 9:36 PM

    Nice. Do you have a secret sauce to get the price low or is it just a case of the usual overcharging by cloud providers?

    Also read your twitter bio: I wont repeat here for privacy but would enjoy seeing stories about those things posted on HN

  • by arcastroe on 12/1/23, 5:19 AM

    Tha translations worked great in my testing between Spanish/English.

    How does it work? Is it essentially a fine-tuned LLM? If so, which base model?

  • by sanjogg on 11/29/23, 5:53 PM

    I gave it a shot! Works really well.