What counts towards my usage?
Which actions use words from your plan's allowance, which are free, and how words are counted.
Who this is for: anyone watching the account's words. The account's Owners and Billing members see the full figures on the Usage page.
Your plan includes an allowance of AI translation each month. Usage is measured against that allowance, and what happens when you exceed it depends on whether usage-based billing is turned on for your workspace. See Usage-based billing.
The allowance belongs to the account and is shared by every workspace in it.
What counts
Every word sent to Glossa counts towards your cycle, whatever it was sent for.
- AI translation. The source words of each string, once for every language it is translated into. Translating a 10-word string into three languages uses 30 words.
- Quality checks. Scoring a translation sends it to Glossa to read, so the source words of every string in the check count.
- Brand voice drafts. Asking Glossa to draft a style guide from translations you have already approved counts the words it reads.
- Repairs. A string that fails a check and is translated again counts its words again, on every try. Auto-heal does this without anyone pressing a button.
Before a run starts, its confirmation says how many words it will use and how many are left this cycle. If the run needs more words than you have left and usage-based billing is off, "The run is refused: nothing is started and nothing is charged."
AI suggestions, assistant replies and glossary extraction also each have their own limit per cycle, shared by the account's workspaces. The Plan limits card on the Usage page says when they reset.
What does not count
- Reused translations. When the exact same source text has been translated before, transglot reuses that translation at no cost instead of translating it again. That is what Words reused at $0 on your dashboard measures, and why keeping translation memory on lowers your usage.
- Anything you or your team write by hand.
- Reading, filtering and approving.
- The quality scorecard, which summarises findings the quality checks have already produced.
How words are counted
A word is a run of text between spaces that contains at least one letter or digit, so punctuation, bullets and arrows on their own do not count. Languages written without spaces between words are counted from their characters instead: in Chinese and Japanese each character counts as one word, following the convention translation tools use, and Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese are counted as their characters divided by a fixed average word length.
Where to see your usage
- Usage, in the account's settings, shows Words this cycle against the allowance, when the words reset, the words used By workspace, and the Last six cycles. Account Owners can also select Show projects to see a workspace's words by project.
- Members who reach a whole workspace see that workspace's AI words on its dashboard.
- The account's Owners and Billing members are emailed when usage reaches 50%, 75% and 100% of the plan's allowance.
Keeping usage down
- Keep translation memory on. It is the biggest single saving.
- Adding a language multiplies the work: every untranslated key in it is a translation.
- With auto-translate on, new and changed source strings are translated as they arrive, without anyone pressing a button. That is usually what you want, and it is also the setting most likely to surprise you on the meter.