About
localize.today exists because I needed to translate a help center and didn't want to sit through a sales demo to do it.
The problem
I run a small product studio. One of our projects needed multilingual support for a HelpScout knowledge base. The obvious choice was Localize.js — the industry standard for drop-in website translation.
I went to their site, clicked "Get Started," and landed on a form asking for my company name, team size, and preferred meeting time. For a script tag. To translate a help page.
I didn't want a demo. I didn't want to negotiate pricing tiers. I didn't want to explain my "use case" to a sales representative just to get a JavaScript snippet on my page. I wanted to add one line of code and move on with my day.
The alternatives weren't better
Google Translate widget injects a toolbar, rewrites your DOM, tracks your visitors, and produces translations that read like they were written by a committee of dictionaries.
i18next and next-intl are excellent tools — if you're building a React app and have weeks to set up translation files, routing, and a localization workflow. For a marketing site or knowledge base, they're a sledgehammer for a nail.
Weglot is close to what I wanted, but starts at €15/month, locks your translations on their servers, and charges by word count. For a help center that changes weekly, those costs add up.
So I built it
localize.today is the tool I wanted to find: one script tag, LLM-powered translation, and it just works. No sign-up, no dashboard, no sales call.
The translation quality is better than traditional machine translation because it uses large language models that understand context. The client library is 12KB with zero dependencies. Translations stream in real time and get cached at the edge, so repeat visits load in under 50ms.
The whole thing runs on Cloudflare Workers. The backend is open source. If you outgrow the hosted version, fork it and deploy on your own account.
The philosophy
Developer tools should be tools, not platforms. You shouldn't need an account to evaluate a product. You shouldn't need a meeting to get a price. And you definitely shouldn't need a "enterprise plan" to translate a help page.
localize.today is free, it's open, and it does one thing well: translate your website so your visitors can read it in their language.
Built by @staskulesh from Auckland, New Zealand.