Writing and content decision
Linguise
A competent developer can build a useful hosted translation proxy and cache with external API calls in ~1 week, but reproducing Linguise's ecosystem of many CMS integrations, hosted dashboard features, and managed model optimizations would require much more work or ongoing operations.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Use a small backend + JS snippet to proxy page HTML to a translation API, cache translated pages, serve cached translations by path/subdomain, and provide a tiny editor for fixes.
What it still won’t have
- Prebuilt plugins for 40+ CMS (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, etc.)
- Hosted dashboard and live front-end editor with role management
- Any proprietary 'Linguise AI' specialized translation model or in-house optimizations
- SLA, built-in SEO automation (dynamic sitemap submission), and managed installation support
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal website-translation service using Node.js + Express, Redis for cache, Postgres (or SQLite) for metadata, and a static JS snippet client. Core features in scope: 1) a public JS snippet that rewrites links and requests translated pages by language; 2) backend endpoint that fetches a source URL, calls an external translation API (e.g., Google Translate API or OpenAI translate endpoint), injects language-relative URLs, and returns translated HTML; 3) cache translated HTML in Redis with configurable TTL and URL+lang keys; 4) a tiny admin UI to view and edit cached translations and to trigger cache invalidation; 5) generate multilingual sitemap XML files and serve language-specific subpaths or subdomains. Out of scope: building dozens of CMS-native plugins, training custom translation models, enterprise billing, analytics beyond basic page counts. Include robust error handling for failed API calls and cache misses, input validation, and unit tests for the translation proxy, cache logic, and sitemap generation.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productLinguise official product
- official docsLinguise documentation
- open sourceObservedObserver/chatgpt-i18n
- open sourcegrow/grow
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
