I Got Quoted $497/mo for Translation Management So I Built My Own

Siddharth Saxena — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:08:17 +0000

The Sticker Shock 😱

I was building out my third side business (yeah, I have a problem) and hit the translation phase. You know the drill - app's ready, now you need it in Spanish, French, maybe German.

Googled "translation management tool" and clicked on the first promising-looking SaaS. Homepage looked clean, features made sense. Hit the pricing page and...

$497/month for the starter tier.

I actually laughed. Then got annoyed. Then really annoyed.

Wait, What Am I Actually Paying For?

Look, I've been writing code for 10+ years. I run a dev shop, have multiple SaaS products, know my way around a stack. So I started mentally breaking down what these tools actually do:

Store key-value pairs (it's literally a database)
Call a translation API (Claude/GPT/DeepL)
Let you download the results (file export)
Maybe some UI to edit stuff

That's... kind of it? Sure, there's versioning, collaboration, whatever. But $500/month for what's essentially a CRUD app with some API calls?

The AI translation itself costs pennies. DeepL charges like $5 per million characters. Even Claude API is cheap for this use case. So where's the other $495 going?

The Internal Debate

Part of me thought: "Just pay it, focus on your business."

But the bootstrapper in me was screaming. I have a full-time job. I'm already running SheetKala (e-commerce), QwikTik (booking system), Sculptribe (3D printing marketplace), plus my dev shop. My wife Neha is in on all these businesses. We're not exactly short on things to do.

Building another tool made zero rational sense.

But that pricing kept bothering me. Like a splinter in my brain.

Fine, I'll Build It 🖥️

At 2am one night (when all great/terrible decisions happen), I created a new repo. My logic was:

Give it 6 months
See if anyone else finds this pricing offensive
Worst case: I get a free tool for my own projects
Best case: Maybe this is actually a business

Started building. CLI-first because honestly, who wants another dashboard? I live in the terminal anyway.

Technical Decisions (AKA: What I Already Knew)

I wasn't trying to be clever:

Node.js + TypeScript - because I write it daily
MongoDB - I already know it, don't care if it's trendy or not
Angular for the dashboard - yeah I know, everyone's on React. I ship faster with Angular
AI translation - Obviously. The economics make sense
CLI primary, web secondary - Terminal > clicking around

The architecture is boring on purpose. I don't need to prove anything technical here, I need to ship.

The Fun Parts (Not Really Fun)

Razorpay rejected me. My payment gateway just said "nope" to my KYC. Weeks wasted. Switched to Paddle, which works but takes a bigger cut. Whatever.

Pricing anxiety. Should it be $9? $19? $5? I overthink everything. Landed on $9 because that's what I'd actually pay.

Freemium calculations. How generous can I be without going broke? Settled on 1K keys + 5 languages free. That's enough for small projects or testing.

"Should I add [feature X]?" - Every. Single. Day. Fighting feature creep is harder than writing code.

What Actually Works Right Now

The basic flow:

# Initialize in your project
langctl init

# Push your keys
langctl push ./locales/en.json

# AI translates to your target languages
# Pull the translations
langctl pull

It handles:

JSON/YAML key-value files
Multiple projects
AI-powered translation
Simple web dashboard for editing
Export/import

It doesn't (yet) handle:

Complex plural rules
Context hints for translations (coming soon)
Fancy collaboration features
TMS integrations
Whatever enterprise feature set costs $500/mo

The Bootstrapping Reality

I'm not trying to build the next unicorn. I'm trying to build something useful that doesn't cost $500/month.

Current status:

2 months live
A handful of users (mostly me testing)
Breaking even? Lol, no
Do I regret it? Also no

The free tier is genuinely free because that's what I'd want. No credit card, no "trial", just use it. If you grow past 1K keys, then yeah, pay something.

Why I'm Sharing This

Partly to rant about SaaS pricing. Partly because I'm curious if this bothers anyone else.

If you're building side projects, have multiple locales, and looked at translation tool pricing and went "WTF"... you're my people.

I'm not precious about this. If it helps a few indie devs save money, cool. If it becomes a real business, even cooler. If I'm completely wrong and there's a reason these tools cost $500, someone please explain it to me.

Current State (Being Real With You)

Look, I'm not gonna pretend this is production-ready enterprise software:

Payment gateway is still being wired up. Click "Upgrade" and you'll see an early adopter form. If you're interested, drop your email - planning a launch discount
I've tested most flows once. ONCE. Not "tested in prod with 1000 users" tested
Bugs? Probably. Haven't found them all yet
Documentation? Exists but needs love

This is a nights-and-weekends project that's 2 months old. If you try it and something breaks, that's on me - but also let me know so I can fix it.

Questions for You

Am I crazy or is translation tooling weirdly expensive?
What would YOU actually pay for this?
Any features that are dealbreakers if missing?

Site: langctl.com (live but still rough around edges)

Written at 1:30am because that's apparently when I write blog posts now

tags: webdev, i18n, showdev, saas

Forem: Siddharth Saxena