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Comment by aterp | Hacker News Reader

This is very very cool! I'm stoked about the idea but 18 AUD/month is a lot, subscriptions add up. I'm more willing to pay something below 10 AUD, plus a longer trial.

I understand if that cost range is just not feasible, though.

In any case, best of luck with this!

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Thanks!

I'd love to decrease the price, but DeepL is really quite expensive. I'm hoping I can decrease it in the long run as users build the cache, but there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem because I need users first.

Have you tried Llms for translation? Much, much cheaper, and in my experience as good as deepl

I've spoken to natively multilingual friends and they weren't very positive about LLMs, particularly with French. That was GPT-3.5 though, so it might have improved. Certainly worth looking into.

The other issue is latency, which DeepL is pretty good at.

Interesting. Is it possible to provide own API key from deepl?

That's a good suggestion, I hadn't considered that. I could charge a fixed fee for access to the relay server, and then if it weren't in the relay's cache it'd use your API key so you'd be dynamically billed without losing access to the cache. It'd be a fairly large change for a small audience though (how many people are willing to setup API keys etc?). You'd find that it'd be more expensive if you used it a lot and less expensive if you didn't - right now I'm giving people access to ~1.8x more credit than they're charged for (please don't abuse it! I'll notice with how few users I have, anyway).

Right now my focus is on why not a single user has converted from the demo, and yet I got four from posting it on producthunt without a demo. I think I might not make it clear enough when it's ended - it stops translating and tells you if you open the popup, but maybe people aren't noticing?

I tried it and wanted it to work, but it only translated a few sentences on the page for me. On the highest level of difficulty, the whole page should be highlighted, don't you think?

One more recommendation: collect emails for people like me who want to see how your project develops over time.

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