Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing about hypothetical for-profit products and people's weekend hobby projects being affected by this change, but does anyone have any example of an actual business that will be affected by this change?

Note that most of these APIs have 3 year deprecation policies and so will continue to be around; only the translate api is going away (and that's in December).

I have serious doubts that almost anyone would actually pay per translate (and if you would, it's likely you could work out a license deal independent of a public API anyway). It seems like the reaction to this has more to do with annoyance that another cool free service is going away and remaining anger over app engine pricing changes.

Yes. I hire many translators. We use google translate, and license professional dictionaries to speedup the process. I estimate that Google translate saves us $20k/year. I personally would be willing to pay a lot for continued access to the translate API. (I'll probably just end up using some sort of iframe hackery when the translate API goes away)

The actual business is http://www.yabla.com/

Check out http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ - I find the translations aren't always as good with idiomatic phrases, but it does a pretty good job and the API is complete and easy to use.

Yabla seems very interesting. Care to share more details? How is it doing, who and where from are the largest user groups, how did you end up with the idea, etc.

We use Google Translate where I work for a some very small customer service related tasks. Our business is not "built on" Google Translate (and has nothing to do with translation), but it solves some small problems for us and is easily worth $10-20 a month for a low volume of requests. Actually, since we already have it integrated and are happy with it, we'd probably pay more just to have the problems solved so we can focus on really important things.

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