How much does church translation cost?

Short answer: far less than the old way. Live church translation today is a monthly subscription — priced by how many hours you use, how many languages you offer, and how many people listen — not a closet full of headsets and per-event interpreter fees. Here's how the pricing actually works and what moves the number.

The old model vs. the new one

The traditional setup meant buying or renting an interpreter booth, a stack of receiver units (often $200+ each), and paying a human interpreter per service, per language. A modest setup ran into the thousands up front and kept costing money every weekend — and it still only covered one or two languages.

Phone-based translation flips that. There's no hardware to buy: guests use the phones they already own. Adding a language costs essentially nothing extra, because it's software, not another bin of headsets. You pay a predictable monthly fee instead of a per-event hardware-and-labor bill.

What you actually pay for

Hours of use — how much live translation you run each month (a weekly service uses far fewer hours than a daily conference).
Languages — how many target languages you offer at once.
Listeners — roughly how many people tune in concurrently.

That's the whole shape of it. Plans bundle a sensible amount of each, and you size up only if you outgrow them.

Typical price ranges

For a single congregation running one weekly service in a couple of extra languages, entry plans start around $149/month. Multi-service churches and multilingual congregations using it every week land in the mid-hundreds; multi-campus networks and large weekend ministries scale from there. Conferences and one-off events are usually quoted per event. See full pricing for the current tiers and what each includes.

How to keep the cost down

Pay annually. Annual plans typically save a couple of months and add an hours buffer.
Right-size your languages. Start with the languages actually in your pews (see choosing which languages to offer) and add more when there's real demand — it's cheap to add later.
Use a free live test first. Prove it fits your service before you commit to a plan.

Is it worth it?

Weigh it against the alternative. A single interpreter for one language can cost more per service than a month of software that covers a dozen languages for the whole congregation. For most churches the math isn't close — and the people who were being left out get included starting the first Sunday.