Alternatives
Products that do what I built a fast, accurate translation API for 1/30th the price of Google does
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…
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A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to…
2024 · github.com
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Hello, I made machine translation server for Ubuntu that can translate unlimited volume of text, HTML, files and audio via REST API. It works ultra-fast, translate millions of web-pages / day in 110 languages. This helps to drive more customers or enter new markets easily. It comes as a docker image. The price starts from $200 / month. Easy integration with your projects. Free demo available. More details here: https://lingvanex.com/translationserver/ Or write me: [email protected]
2022
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Translate the video with GPT model and Azure Speech Services
2024
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2020 · github.com
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Hey there! Out of the necessity to teach my son a new language, I developed an app just for him. After months of use and realizing how effective it was, I decided to make it available to the public. Now, I’m looking for your support, feedback, and possibly help in reaching potential customers. Take a look and let me know your thoughts! Thank you!
2024 · voiczy.com
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Hi folks, Alex here with a launch I’m hoping for some feedback on! I recently finished what started as a hackathon-style project with a friend, which has now become TranslateMyCall.com. The problem we set out to solve is that there’s currently no way to interpret phone calls between languages without a human in the loop. Apps like Google Translate work well for in-person conversations, and Skype (surprising, right?) is the best I’ve found for VoIP interpreting. But for traditional phone calls, your only option is paying $1 to $4 per minute for a human interpreter through a service like…
5d ago · translatemycall.com
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Hi HN! I'm Ilya, creator of Localit.io - a translation management system for dev teams who are tired of expensive tools like Lokalise and Phrase. The problem: Traditional TMS solutions charge $100-2000/month for basic localization features. Complex setups take hours, and many charge extra for Git integrations. What we built: - Direct GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket integration (including Enterprise) - AI translations via ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate - Professional translators through Gengo - Built-in team chat with message translation - Mobile app for remote translators - Same…
2025 · localit.io
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Hey HN! I built Transcrib.ee to help me generate transcripts for lectures on YouTube with no captions, especially multilingual lectures. I was constantly frustrated with videos that had no transcripts or inaccurate ones, so I built a tool and decided to share it with everyone. This tool uses Groq (an AI inference engine that's different from Grok and offers very fast processing) and OpenAI's Whisper model (really accurate in multilingual) to quickly transcribe any YouTube video, regardless of the language. It's been a game-changer for my studies! To make it even faster, I created a Chrome…
2024 · transcrib.ee
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In the dark old days when I was uninspired and couldn't come up with a name for a project I'd hop onto my old pal Google Translate and see if a keyword associated with my name "sounded cool in German" If it did, and the domain was unused I'd scoop it up and use it. This process took a while, I'd try German, French, Russian, Armenian, Latvian, etc trying to find something cool that wasn't already being used. So I built http://www.catelus.com/ It translates your keyword into more than 30 different languages and checks if your-word-in-german.com and your-word-in-polish.com are…
2016
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As hard as I tried, I didn't find a modern language learning book that's either very academic, or like "master a language with my super-magic great method in 3 months". So I dug into the academic research, tried many techniques myself, saw what worked, wrote a book for learners of any language and any level, and made it free without ads. Today, finally, a 2 years-long project ends. I hope it helps anyone. Book's here: https://thehardway.guide/ Cheers
2023
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2025 · github.com
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Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!
2022 · whisperapi.com
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Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com
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Hi HN, I built Lengpal, a simple language exchange platform where two people get instantly matched on video to practice their native and target languages. There’s a timer built in so both sides get equal time to speak. I created this because I wanted something beyond passive apps like Duolingo. Something to actually speak with real people without the hassle of scheduling or chat fatigue. Right now we are testing the concept with a waitlist. We’ve collected 77 emails so far from Reddit and IndieHackers. I would love your feedback before launching the MVP. Site:…
2025
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In 2023, I tried my luck with four different educational apps, but none of them really made any money. Then, while working on an English learning website, I added a simple feature where users could chat with AI. Surprisingly, this became super popular! This got me thinking: why not create an app that lets people practice speaking English with AI characters? I put together a basic version of the app in a month and shared it on voz.vn, a well-known forum in Vietnam. The app got 500 downloads on the first day alone, though I didn't earn any money from it initially. In the next 3 months, I only…
2024 · fluentpal.app
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Hi Hackernews Community, Have long been a fan of yours. Waited long to perfect my video/audio translation product as a solopreneur. Now, we have a testable product with 10,000+ monthly users. We are not perfect yet but we provide a ton of features. We provide AI-generated subtitles. We let the user edit the subtitles and timestamps. User can edit the translated audio/video unlimited times without additional fees. We are in the process of making voice cloning free for all users, hopefully completing this weekend. We are launching a chrome extension and mobile app too. Though we…
2024 · videodubber.ai
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I’ve always wanted to localize my personal apps, but I found it to be too expensive. Since many apps share the same vocabulary (News Feed, Dashboard, Forgot Password, Take Photo), it seemed silly to pay to translate words that some other development team must have previously paid to translate. So, I’ve created an open-source translation memory for all iOS developers to benefit from. I processed over 500K GitHub iOS projects, AppleGlot, and other open-source resources and created a database of almost 15 million translations. Check it out here:…
2021
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Why pay $144/yr for Grammarly when AI does it for $0?
Feb 2026 · grammarpeace.com
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Our use case: our app has Russian (our native language) and English. We needed to quickly and easily add more languages (as requested by clients). Our translation files were a mess: duplicated strings, concatenation instead of placeholders, different string order in ru/en files, trailing spaces, and much more. So I wrote a helper tool to fix all of this. Now, adding a new language takes just 40 minutes and $2. It worked so well that I cleaned up the project and released it as open source. # Key feature: Translation into new languages happens from two source languages at once: the…
2025 · github.com
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