Lokalise rebuilt its pricing in late 2025: there's no free plan, entry is $149/month, and the meter is now processed words. Here's what each plan includes, the gotchas, and who should pay for it.
Lokalise has changed its pricing a lot in the last year. In late 2025 it retired its older seat-and-key plan lineup, dropped its free plan, and moved the meter to processed words. If you last looked at Lokalise pricing in 2024, most of what you remember is out of date.
Here's the current structure as of September 2026, what actually drives the bill, and an honest read on when Lokalise is worth it.
Prices and allowances are from lokalise.com/pricing and Lokalise's plan documentation as of September 2026. Monthly and annual billing are both offered. There's no free plan; you start with a 14-day trial (no credit card) that gives you Enterprise features during the trial.
Prices checked September 22, 2026.
| Explorer | Growth | Advanced | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $149/mo | $379/mo | $1,049/mo (book a demo) | Custom (demo) |
| Processed words | from 5K/mo (60K/year) | from 20K/mo (225K/year) | Set with sales | Custom |
| Pro AI words | Add-on | from 3K/mo (40K/year) | Set with sales | Custom |
| Advanced seats | 5 | 10 | Set with sales | Custom |
| Integrations | 2 | 3 | Set with sales | Custom |
All paid plans include unlimited translator and reviewer seats and unlimited hosted words. Standard AI/MT translation is bundled too (Explorer includes 20K standard AI/MT words a month; on Growth it's included within your processed-word limit). Prices have moved since the restructure, so check the live page before budgeting.
Allowances can be extended with add-on bundles — Lokalise's pricing page notes Explorer goes up to 40K processed words a month with add-ons. Add-on pricing isn't listed in the plan table.
This is the number that decides your bill, so it's worth quoting Lokalise's own definition: processed words are "source words actively translated through the platform, not words stored."
That's an activity meter, not a storage meter — the mirror image of Crowdin's hosted-words model, which meters what you store rather than what you do (we've broken down Crowdin's pricing separately). Storage metering punishes big catalogs that sit still; activity metering punishes fast-moving products that iterate. Know which one your product is before picking a platform.
The practical consequences of metering activity:
None of this is hidden, and Lokalise documents the model clearly. But it rewards teams whose content is stable and punishes teams that ship and iterate frequently, which is worth knowing before you commit a year.
The jump between tiers is steep. There's nothing between $149 and $379, and nothing between $379 and $1,049. Outgrow Explorer's processed-word or seat allowance and your bill grows about 2.5x in one step.
"Advanced seats" are the real seat meter. Unlimited seats applies to basic roles. The people configuring projects, automations, and integrations consume advanced seats: 5 on Explorer, 10 on Growth. Developer-led teams, where everyone touches configuration, should count their advanced-seat need honestly.
There's no free plan. Entry is $149/month, and the 14-day trial is the only free path.
The top tiers are sales-gated. Both Advanced and Enterprise start with "Book a demo." Budget the procurement time, not just the sticker.
And as with most TMS platforms: extraction comes first. Lokalise manages strings that already live in translation files. Finding the hardcoded strings in your codebase and wrapping them in translation calls — often a days-to-weeks-long step — is on your team.
Take a concrete team: a 6,000-word SaaS app, 10 target languages, shipping product changes that touch roughly 300 source words a month.
Year-one total: roughly 116,000 processed words. That's nearly double Explorer's 60,000, so you'd either buy add-on bundles or start at Growth (from 225,000 a year) for about $4,550/year billed monthly. Add the extraction work (wrapping ~1,000 hardcoded strings by hand can run $1,200-3,000 in developer time) and a realistic year-one cost lands between $5,700 and $7,500, before any add-ons.
The estimate to run for your own app: (total source words × languages) for the initial pass, plus (monthly changed words × languages × 12) for the year. If that lands above 60,000, price Growth, not Explorer.
The honest case for paying $144-999/month, because for the right team it's a good product:
If that's you, Growth at $379/month is the realistic starting point for a team doing serious volume — Explorer's 60K processed words a year and add-on-only Pro AI words suit smaller workloads. See our full Polyglot vs Lokalise comparison for the feature-by-feature breakdown.
Polyglot solves a different problem. It's a CLI that scans your codebase for hardcoded-string candidates via AST parsing, rewrites them into translation calls from a plan you review, translates them, and previews the result locally. Generated translations are reviewed in Polyglot's dashboard. Two structural pricing differences matter here.
The free surface isn't a trial. Local scanning, wrapping, and preview are free and need no account. Lokalise's free path is 14 days. Translation is the metered part: 500 lifetime strings on the free plan, then paid plans.
The string meter doesn't charge you for iterating. Polyglot meters translation in source strings — a lifetime allowance, never a monthly reset — plus monthly character volume on Team and Scale. Each distinct source string counts once, so re-translating an existing string or adding a target language to it doesn't consume new string quota (your plan's language limit still applies, and characters still count on Team and Scale). Contrast with processed words, where both of those operations meter.
| Polyglot Pro | Polyglot Team | Polyglot Scale | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $49/mo ($39 annual) | $149/mo ($119 annual) | $499/mo ($449 annual) |
| Strings (lifetime) | 10,000 | 25,000 | Unlimited |
| Languages | 5 | 15 | Unlimited |
| Characters | Unlimited | 3M/mo | 25M/mo |
| Seats | 1 | 5 | 15 |
Full plan details are in the pricing section of the homepage. At $49/month, Polyglot Pro costs about a third of Lokalise's entry tier — but the fairer framing is that they're priced for different buyers: Lokalise for teams with human translators who need a collaborative dashboard, Polyglot for developer-led teams who want to start localization from their code.
On translation quality, Polyglot published a re-judgeable benchmark of its June 2026 pipeline, AI-judged: 4.96/5 across 49 languages, with 100% placeholder preservation and 94.5% of translations given the top score (5/5). Production has since changed models, so treat those as June's results. The dataset, judge prompts, and scoring harness are open source, so you can re-score the June outputs yourself.
Before deciding whether Lokalise's meter fits your usage, it's worth knowing your actual numbers:
curl -fsSL https://getpolyglot.ai/install.sh | bash
polyglot scan
Free, no account. You'll get a candidate count of the strings you'd be paying either tool to handle.
Start in your terminal
Install the CLI, run a scan, and see exactly what you're missing. Free, no account required.