Framer Localization Without a Subscription

Every mainstream way to translate a Framer site bills you every month, and stops serving your translated pages the day you stop paying.

Framer’s own Locales add-on charges $20 per month per locale. Weglot serves translated versions on a subdomain or subdirectory. Linguana hosts them on its own infrastructure. In all three cases the translations depend on a live subscription, and none of the three documents publicly what becomes of them after you cancel.

That is fine when translation is an ongoing operation with a team behind it. It is a poor deal for a founder who translated a five-page site once and now pays rent on it forever.

There is a route without a subscription. This is what it costs and what it gives up.

What “no subscription” actually buys you

The point is not saving money, although you do. The point is that the translated pages become ordinary pages in your own Framer project.

They sit at /fr, /de, /es. They are editable on the canvas like any other page. Google indexes them at your own URLs, so the authority they accumulate is yours. And if you uninstall the plugin that made them, every page stays exactly where it is.

Nothing is rented. Nothing goes offline when a card expires.

What it costs, next to the alternatives

Three extra languages, over one year, checked in June 2026:

• Framer Locales: around $720, billed $20 per locale per month, no annual discount found.
• Weglot: around €290. Its €15 Starter plan covers a single language; three languages means Business at €29 a month.
• Linguana: around $228 on Starter, billed yearly ($25 monthly), with a one-time grant of 10,000 AI credits.
• Page Translator: €29, once, unlimited languages and pages on Pro.

Year two, the first three charge you again. The fourth does not. Bear in mind these are different kinds of number: three subscriptions against one purchase, in two currencies. Price your own case.

If you also have a blog or a product catalogue in a CMS collection, add CMS Translator at €19, or take both for €39 as the Translation Pack.

Start without paying anything

The free tier covers one target language, up to five pages, and one instant translation run. No card, no expiry.

That is enough to translate a small site, or the five pages of a bigger one that matter most, and look at the result on your own pages before deciding. Which is the right way round: you should see what the output looks like on your real content, not on a demo.

Translating without paying for an API either

Three modes, and none of them requires a translation subscription.

Instant mode runs the AI translation inside the plugin. No API key, nothing to configure.

Your own DeepL key, if you want DeepL’s quality on European languages, where it is historically strongest. DeepL closed its old 500,000-per-month free plan to new signups: new accounts get a one-time 1,000,000-character credit that does not reset.

Copy and paste into an LLM you already pay for. The plugin extracts every text node into a structured prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, paste the returned JSON back, and the pages are generated. If you already pay for an AI assistant, your translation budget is zero.

Add your brand names and technical terms to the Glossary first, so they survive every mode untouched.

What you give up

This is the honest part, and it is short.

You do it yourself. There is no dashboard, no translator roles, no visual editor for a team of linguists. You edit the translated pages on the Framer canvas. If professional translators work on your copy, Weglot’s workflow is worth its subscription and this route is not for you.

It is Framer only. If you also run a Webflow site, you will need something else for it.

Static pages only. CMS collections need CMS Translator, which is another €19. That is a second purchase, not a hidden fee, but it is a purchase.

Weaker hreflang. Framer locks server-rendered lang and hreflang to its paid native Locales, so the plugin injects hreflang with a script that runs in the browser. Google renders JavaScript and can pick it up; Bing is less reliable. The plugin translates page slugs only when you use DeepL mode, and it never translates page titles or meta descriptions. Native Locales, Weglot and Linguana all serve hreflang from the server. If that matters to your project, this route is not the right trade.

Nothing is managed for you. The pages live in your project, and maintaining them is your job. That is the same sentence as “you own them”, read from the other side.

Setting it up

1. Install the plugin and translate one language on up to five pages, free.
2. Look at the pages. They are yours, on the canvas, editable.
3. Upgrade to Pro when you need more languages or more pages. €29, once.
4. Generate the hreflang tags, and set the lang attribute and text direction per locale. Both are client-side: lang and direction serve accessibility and browser translation prompts, not Google, which does not use them to detect a page’s language.
5. Insert the Language Switcher component. It resolves links on the published site, not on the canvas.
6. Publish, then check the hreflang tags are reciprocal, with a validator rather than Search Console, which stopped reporting hreflang errors in 2022. The hreflang guide explains what to look for.
7. If you have a CMS, translate the collections too.

Is it the right trade

If you localize a large site continuously, with translators on staff, a subscription buys you a workflow that a one-time plugin cannot.

If you translated your site once, you want the pages to still be there in two years, and you would rather not pay rent on work you already did: this is the trade.

There is a full comparison of all four options if you want to check the numbers before deciding.