Google Translate and Freemium

For about two years, I’ve maintained a Ruby library called EasyTranslate for working with the Google Translate API. Google Translate has been (like other Google APIs) free to use withing a certain range.

Recently, they’ve deprecated (read: completely turned off) access to v1, due to “substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse”. That’s really a shame. The larger shame is that there is no free usage tier for v2 of the API. Even to santiy check my API client (that I don’t even use anymore), I need to pay.

This reminds me of an article I read yesterday on HackerNews (and linked by Kenny Katzgrau) about how one developer is fed up with freemium as a model due to lack of conversion from free to paying customers. I don’t really agree with that article for a few reasons:

• The timeframe of his freemium strategy was too short to build the devoted user base that freemium depends upon
• The product he was working with is (however well done it may be) not something that users will build loyalty to, but rather a seasonal site of a sort that most people would reasonably expect to find for free
• If you expect a high number of people to pay, just charge for the service and accept the lower virality along with making the bar of entry higher. I’d argue if he hadn’t had a freemium model in place at all, his overally hit count and paying customer count would have been even lower.

But the article does frame a discussion for deeper problems with freemium APIs like Google’s. Automated abuse can quickly ruin a great service, but I have to think there must be a middle ground between non-keyed API access (as before), and no free-usage tier. What do you think?

NOTE: Last night I largely reorganized and re-spec’ed easy_translate to work solely off of the examples in the API docs. Its released now as v0.3.0.

EasyTranslate v0.1.1

EasyTranslate is a Ruby binding for the Google translate/detect APIs (Documentation). Its different than other libraries that do the same for a few reasons:

• Only Ruby binding to have support for Bulk Translations
• Only Ruby binding to offer POST support for long translations
• Supports every option in the API, especially API keys and user_ip, which most Ruby bindings skip over.
• Has an extremely clean syntax

# woah, really?
EasyTranslate.translate('Hello, world', :to => :spanish)
 => "Hola, mundo"

# what about batch translation?
EasyTranslate.translate(['Hello', 'Goodbye'], :to => :spanish)
 => ["¡Hola", "Despedida"]

# what if you're even crazier?
EasyTranslate.translate(['Hello', 'Goodbye'], :to => [:es, :it])
 => [['¡Hola', 'Despedida'], ['Ciao', 'Addio']]

# translate something into every language in Google Translate
# WITH A SINGLE CALL TO THE API
EasyTranslate.translate('hello', :to => EasyTranslate.LANGUAGES.keys)

The whole thing is licensed under the MIT License, so get out there, make something cool, and let me know how it turns out!

$ gem install easy_translate

Check it out on Github