Articles on: Troubleshooting

What happens if I reach my monthly LiveTranslate limit?

LiveTranslate is a Crisp feature available as of Crisp Unlimited, which lets you chat with a user who does not speak your language. Busy Crisp inboxes with a lot of international users may be using LiveTranslate quite heavily, and thus they may hit our per-website quotas. Learn how you can fix LiveTranslate quota limit errors.

What LiveTranslate quotas are in place?

LiveTranslate quotas are in place to protect Crisp against service abuse, as well as to ensure that your website has a smooth balance of translation quota available throughout the month:

Translated characters are limited to 1,000,000 for paid Unlimited plans, and 100,000 for trial Unlimited plans (per month).
Individual translation requests are limited to 5,000 for paid Unlimited plans (every 3 hours), or 2,000 for trial Unlimited plans (every 6 hours).

All of those quotas are included, free of charge, in all Crisp Unlimited plans. If you are using a Crisp Unlimited trial, your translation quotas will be updated to their final (paid) limits as soon as you pay for the first time (ie. that you receive your pro-rata invoice).

What happens when the LiveTranslate quota is reached?

When at least one of the LiveTranslate quota is reached (for the website, ie. shared amongst all your operators), further translation requests will be rejected with a "quota limit reached" error in your Crisp dashboard.

Attempting to translate a message when a quota is reached shows an error

Most of the time, this "quota limit reached" error is temporary, and will disappear after a few hours. One of your operator may have hit the translation service too hard over the last minutes, and thus got rate-limited. Less often, your monthly character count quota may have been reached, and thus you may need to increase your quota.

Your monthly translated characters quota is spread over 4 weeks (ie. each week, you can use a fourth of the monthly quota). If you reached this quota threshold, you'll have to wait a bit more than usual, or subscribe to higher quota limits, that you can pay for (see below).

How can I request for a higher monthly quota?

👉 Requesting a higher monthly quota is as easy as going to your Crisp Dashboard website settings, scrolling down to "Usage / Limits" and then increasing your "Translate Characters" limit..

Read our guide on how to increase your limits & quotas for more on how to increase your LiveTranslate quotas.

The monthly price for higher quotas for your Crisp website is calculated as such:

Free characters: you do not pay for the first 1 million characters, which are already included in your Crisp plan, free of charge;
Price per extra character: 20 USD per 1 million characters (per month);
Discount rate: after 20 million extra characters, each additional 1 million extra characters are discounted 30% (reach out to our support to apply the discount);

As an example:

If my website needs 10 million total LiveTranslate characters per month, I'd pay: 20 USD x (10 - 1) = 180 USD per month (in addition to what I pay for Crisp Unlimited).
If my website needs 50 million total LiveTranslate characters per month, I'd pay: 20 USD x 20 + 14 USD x (30 - 1) = 806 USD per month (in addition to what I pay for Crisp Unlimited).

Why is there a quota on LiveTranslate?

LiveTranslate relies on an external provider as to deliver quality translations. Unfortunately, this feature could not be built in-house at Crisp (though, we have plans to do so in the future). That means that this external provider charges us a monthly bill based on our usage of their service, which is billed for each 1 million characters translated.

At Crisp, we believe that companies should pay a flat monthly subscription, even if they use the product in a different way over time. This mindset has been foundational in the building of all our products. This makes Crisp pricing simple and predictable over time.

Unfortunately, as we rely on this external provider for LiveTranslate which charges us based on monthly usage, we cannot let all of our users use an unlimited amount of translation resources. We have to ensure this stays within a safe monthly limit on a per-website basis (ie. some Crisp users cannot cost us more than they pay for their subscription).

Note that we made sure that those pre-defined monthly limits would not impact most of our users. They might only impact heavy translation users, on (very) busy websites.

Updated on: 30/09/2024

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