# What It Actually Costs to Get an Old Record Read

A free tool, a paid tool and a human translator will quote you nothing, about fifteen cents, and about ten dollars for the same page. They are not competing offers. Here is what each one actually costs in 2026, what you get for it, and when paying a person is the only right answer.


You have an 1834 baptism entry from a Württemberg parish register. It is in Kurrent, in a village pastor's hand, and you cannot read a word of it. What should you expect to pay to find out what it says?

Search for that and you will be quoted between twenty and twenty-nine dollars a page, with a promise of certification and notarisation, and offers of apostilles at eighty dollars and up. That price is real and it is for a different product. It is the going rate for a certified translation of a modern, typed birth certificate of about 250 words for an immigration filing, where what you are buying is a translator's signed attestation for a government official. Nobody in that market is reading Kurrent, and you do not need a notary.

The genuine answer spans four orders of magnitude, from nothing to several hundred dollars for the same page, and the reason the spread is so wide is that the routes are not substitutes for each other. Here is what each costs, verified from the sellers' own published prices, all observed on 8 September 2026.

**The short answer: a free tool tier will read it for nothing, a paid transcription tool costs between six and twenty-four cents a page, a specialist genealogy translation service charges about $10 per standard vital record, a freelance translator working at ordinary per-word rates will come to roughly $15 to $50 for one entry, and a professional genealogist charges $30 to $200 an hour and is not the right person to ask.** Which of those is correct depends less on your budget than on whether the record decides something.

One thing this article does not price: getting hold of the page in the first place. That is a separate bill set by the archive rather than by a translator, it runs on four quite different pricing models, and for a lot of documents it is the larger of the two numbers. We put those side by side in [what archives charge to copy a record](/blog/what-archives-charge-to-copy-a-record).

## Route one: free, and better than it sounds

**Free machine transcription is a real tier, not a demo.** Transkribus, the specialist platform most widely used in this field, gives 50 credits a month on its free plan, and handwritten text recognition consumes one credit per page plus a further quarter credit for line detection. That is around forty pages a month, indefinitely, at no cost. Leo gives ten credits a month. Several other tools give an unstated starter balance.

For a researcher with a handful of documents, forty pages a month is not a trial. It is the whole job, forever.

**FamilySearch Full-Text Search is free and enormous, with one important limit.** It left FamilySearch Labs in August 2025 and searches on the order of two billion record images. It costs nothing and it requires no subscription. The limit is that it searches transcripts of FamilySearch's own collections, and those transcripts are in English, Spanish and Portuguese. German, French, Dutch and Italian have been named as planned additions since late 2025 and we could find no announcement that they have shipped. You also cannot hand it the photograph you took in the archive. For a German or Italian parish page in your own folder, it is not the answer yet.

**The free route nobody documents is a volunteer, and for Western European records it is unusually good.** Several long-running communities run forums where experienced members read and translate documents for other members without charge.

For German records the largest is the *Lese- und Übersetzungshilfe* section of the Ahnenforschung.net forum, which runs to tens of thousands of topics and hundreds of thousands of posts, with a separate subforum for foreign-language documents where Latin, French and Italian entries go. The Archion forum, attached to the German Protestant church archive portal, runs a *Lesehilfen* board of similar character. Both are German-language, which is the friction for an American researcher, though posting an image and a polite request in English is usually tolerated.

For Italian records the best answer is italiangenealogy.com, whose language and translation board carries roughly sixteen thousand topics and eighty thousand posts, in English. Its own description is the whole pitch: there is always someone who can help you.

And across all of these, FamilySearch Community runs free country research groups in English, with a house convention of beginning the thread title with "Translation Request" so that the people who can help find it. The Germany group is the largest at several thousand members, with smaller groups for Italy, the British Isles, Ireland, France, the Nordic countries and others.

This option appears on no comparison page anywhere, which is odd, because for one difficult document it is frequently the best answer available at any price. What it costs is not money. It is a wait of unpredictable length and a social obligation to contribute something back. One warning: FamilySearch also runs a programme called Volunteer Translation, and that is people translating the FamilySearch website into other languages. It is the first thing you will find and it is not what you want.

**What free actually buys you:** a reading of the page. Usually a good one. What it does not buy is a second opinion, a guarantee, structured output you can search, or anybody's judgement about whether the reading is right.

## Route two: paid tools, and the per-page number nobody publishes

Every tool in this category prices in credits and none of them publish a price per page, which makes comparison harder than it needs to be. So here is the arithmetic, done.

| Tool | Plan | Price | Allowance | Cost per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transkribus | Free | €0 | 50 credits per month | €0 |
| Transkribus | Scholar | €99 per year | 900 credits per year | €0.11 |
| Transkribus | Top-up pack | €59.50 once | 250 credits, no expiry | €0.238 |
| Handwriting OCR | Pay as you go | $15 | 100 pages, valid one year | $0.15 |
| Handwriting OCR | Pro | $59 per month | 1,000 pages per month | $0.059 |
| Handwriting to Text | Credit pack | $99.99 once | 1,000 credits, 12 months | $0.10 |
| Leo | Standard | $15 per month | 100 credits | $0.15 |
| Leo | Free | $0 | 10 credits per month | $0 |

Prices as published by each vendor and observed on 8 September 2026. Transkribus states that its prices include Austrian VAT at 20 per cent. Credit definitions differ slightly: Transkribus charges one credit per page for handwritten text recognition but adds a further quarter credit for line detection and a full credit again for table or field recognition, so a page where you want structured columns costs closer to two and a quarter credits than one. Leo defines a credit as one image, which may be a double-page spread, and is the cleanest definition of the four.

Two things fall out of that table that are worth saying out loud.

**The subscription is roughly half the price per page of the top-up pack.** Transkribus Scholar works out at about eleven euro cents a page and its own top-up pack at nearly twenty-four. If you have a defined project of a few hundred pages, the annual plan is the cheaper way to buy them even if you use it for one month.

**The headline figure quoted for Transkribus in most comparison articles is roughly $0.27 a page**, a number that traces back to the 2024 study by Humphries and colleagues later published in *Historical Methods*. It reconciles with the top-up rate and not with the subscription rate. If you see a per-page price for any of these tools, check which purchase path it describes before you compare it to anything.

**What paid tools actually buy you over free ones:** volume, batch handling, export formats, and in some cases a stronger model on difficult hands. They do not buy you accuracy on a single page. On one document the free tier of a good tool and the paid tier of the same tool are frequently the same model.

## Route three: paying a person

This is where the price rises by two orders of magnitude, and it is worth understanding why before deciding it is expensive.

**Per-record translation is the cheapest human option and it is remarkably cheap.** Genealogy Translations publishes a flat rate of $9.99 per record, covering a birth, marriage or death record in short or long form, a short obituary, a gravestone inscription or a short letter, with $3 more for detailed geographic identification and a stated turnaround of 24 hours or less. They discount 5 per cent at five records and 10 per cent at twenty, and their language list names German in all three of its hard forms, Fraktur, Kurrentschrift and Sütterlin, alongside Latin, French, Italian, Old English and others. That covers the two document types most American researchers get stuck on, which are [old German script](/transcribe/german-records) and [Latin parish](/transcribe/latin-parish-records) registers.

Specialists in one script price per record and higher. One service dealing in Kurrent church records from the Austrian crown lands lists a basic translation, meaning names, dates, parents and occupation, at 20 euros for a birth or marriage and a complete word-for-word translation at 35 to 40 euros.

Marketplace sellers sit below both. On Fiverr, established sellers offering Kurrent and Sütterlin transcription were listing basic tiers from around $10 for roughly forty words, described as a registry entry, on two-day delivery. Marketplace starting prices are advertisements rather than delivered prices, and the sellers say so themselves, but the band is real.

**One structural thing about German that nobody warns you about.** Deciphering Kurrent into modern German and translating modern German into English are two different skills, and they are often sold separately. A German transcription specialist may quote 10 to 20 euros a page to render your Kurrent into readable German and explicitly exclude the English translation from that price. The Max Kade Institute's list of transcribers and translators tells people this outright, advising that you may need two different experts. Budget for both steps or ask which one you are buying.

For a sense of what this looks like in the wild rather than on a price list, *Family Tree Magazine* recorded a researcher hiring a translator in Germany for two burial records, paying €10, and having them back in twenty minutes.

**Hourly translation rates are the fallback for anything that is not a standard record.** Upwork's own published guidance gives a median translator rate of $20 an hour with a typical band of $15 to $25, and per-word rates of $0.08 to $0.15 for common languages, $0.15 to $0.25 for niche ones and $0.25 to $0.50 for specialised work. Historical handwriting sits in the upper bands, because it is a paleography job wearing a translation job's clothes.

**Professional genealogists are a different purchase entirely.** The Association of Professional Genealogists, on its consumer-facing guidance, describes rates varying "from $30 to $40 per hour to well over $200 per hour", and notes that most engagements involve a retainer and that copies, some travel and postage are usually billed separately. It is careful to present this as a description of the market rather than an APG standard. ICAPGen gives a band of $50 to $200 an hour, with basic three to four generation projects running $500 to $5,000. Published project pricing from established firms sits in the same place: one well-known agency currently lists a 25-hour project at $3,200 and a 50-hour project at $6,000, which is $120 to $128 an hour.

Country specialists are cheaper and they publish more openly. Irish practitioners list hourly rates of roughly 65 to 90 euros, with minimum engagements of two to six hours. Accredited Genealogists Ireland, notably, publishes no rate guidance at all and says so plainly, that members set their own prices and there is no standard set of fees, and recommends getting quotes from more than one. That is the honest state of the market and it is worth knowing before you assume a professional body has set a going rate.

**Archive agents are the option most researchers do not know exists.** Some services will go to an archive or a comune on your behalf and obtain the record itself. An Italian record-retrieval service publishes prices from 149 euros for a single document, with shipping of a physical original at 55 euros and an apostille at 75 euros a document on top, and works on a no-find-no-fee basis. When the record is not online, and a great deal of Italian, Irish and German material still is not, this is not competing with a transcription tool at all. It is the only route to the document.

**For calibration on what human reading costs at scale**, the Transcribe Bentham project costed a paid senior research associate at £18.35 per transcript, on an assumption of 45 minutes per manuscript. Humphries and colleagues report that professional transcription services charge between $6 and $12 a page. Those figures are for transcription of the source language alone, before anybody translates anything.

## The comparison, on one page

For a single record, in the language it was written in, translated into English.

| Route | Typical cost | Turnaround | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tool tier | €0 | Minutes | A machine reading, unverified |
| Society forum volunteer | €0 | Days to weeks | A human reading, often expert, no guarantee |
| Paid transcription tool | $0.06 to $0.24 | Minutes | A machine reading, plus export and volume |
| Per-record translation service | $10 to $25 | Hours to days | A human translation of a standard record |
| Freelance translator, per word | $15 to $50 per entry | Days | Human reading of non-standard material |
| Professional genealogist | $30 to $200+ per hour | Weeks | Judgement, research and a report |
| Archive retrieval service | €149 and up per record | Weeks to months | A document you could not otherwise get |

Disclosure, since we sell one of these: KleioBase sits in the paid tool row.

## What you are actually buying, which is not the same thing in each row

The table above invites a mistake. It reads as though a $10 translation and a $0.15 machine transcription are the same product at different prices, and they are not.

**A machine gives you a reading and no assessment of it.** It does not know that the surname it produced is one of four plausible readings, and by default it will not tell you it guessed. That is the defining risk of this whole category and we set it out in detail in [how accurate is AI at reading old handwriting](/blog/how-accurate-is-ai-handwriting-transcription). The cost of the tool is not the cost of the answer. The cost of the answer includes the minutes you spend checking names and dates against the image, and those minutes are the same whether the transcription cost fifteen cents or nothing.

**A translator gives you a reading and an implicit assessment.** A good one flags what is uncertain, notes where the ink has failed, and tells you the difference between a word they read and a word they inferred. That flagging is most of what you are paying for and it is exactly the thing free tools do not provide.

**A professional genealogist gives you neither of those. They give you conclusions.** Hiring one to translate a record is like hiring an architect to hang a door. The reason to engage one is that you have a research problem rather than a reading problem, and the deliverable is a documented argument, not a transcript.

**An archive service gives you access.** Nothing else on the list can produce a document that is not digitised.

## When to pay a human

Four cases, and outside them the machine is the rational choice.

**When the document decides something.** If a reading determines whether two families are the same family, whether a line continues, or whether a decade of work was pointed at the right village, pay somebody. The record that names an immigrant's [town of origin](/blog/find-immigrant-ancestor-town-of-origin) is the clearest case of this there is, because everything downstream of it is pointed at a place. Ten dollars against a wrong conclusion you will carry for years is not a close call.

**When the machine and you disagree, or two machines disagree with each other.** Divergence is a signal that the page is hard. Running a difficult page through two free tiers costs nothing and, where they conflict, you have identified precisely the document worth ten dollars of somebody's expertise.

**When the record is the kind that flatters a machine.** A Latin parish entry is a template repeated for two hundred years, so a tool can render eighty per cent of the page perfectly and still invent the surname, and the high apparent accuracy is precisely what hides it. There is also no published test of any of these tools on a German church book or a Latin register, which we go through in [which AI actually reads your German church record](/blog/which-ai-reads-german-church-records-kurrent-latin). Where the evidence is absent and the failure mode is invisible, a human is not a luxury.

**When the document is not a standard record.** Vital records are formulaic, which is what makes them cheap to translate and comparatively easy for a machine. A letter, a will, a court deposition or a marginal annotation is none of those things, and the flat per-record rate will not apply to it either.

One case that looks like it belongs on this list and does not: volume. Four hundred pages is not four hundred times a one-page decision, and paying a human per page for a backlog is almost never the right call, because most of the backlog does not need reading at all. That is a triage problem rather than a budget problem, and we worked through it in [you came home from the archive with 400 photographs](/blog/which-pages-civil-war-pension-file-matter).

## What KleioBase costs

Our free plan gives ten credits a month, and processing one record uses one credit, or five for a deep scan on a hand that needs it. Uploading is always free; processing is what consumes credits. Paid plans and credit packs bring the effective rate down to somewhere between about fifteen cents and two cents a record, depending on the plan and whether you pay monthly or annually, which puts even the entry plan inside the paid tool row of that table and the larger plans below it. Current prices are on [our pricing page](/pricing) rather than in this article, because prices change and articles do not.

What that price includes, and what distinguishes it from a per-page transcription charge, is that the output is not a transcript. Processing produces the transcription in the original language and script, which is never translated, alongside a translation, a narrative and structured fields. Confirming a record creates person profiles, links the record to each person with their role, and starts duplicate matching. You are paying for the archive rather than the reading.

Two honest points about our price.

**On a per-page basis we are not the cheapest way to read a document, and we are not trying to be.** If all you want is the text of one page, a free tier will do it for nothing and a pay-as-you-go transcription tool will do it for fifteen cents. If you want the fortieth document to connect to the first thirty-nine, that is the thing we charge for.

**The credit is not the whole cost.** Every record passes through a review step where you check the fields against the image before confirming, and that step takes your time. We think it is the right design and we will not remove it, but a cost comparison that counts our credit and not your minutes is not an honest one, and the same is true of every other row in the table.

## The habit worth building

Before paying anything, run the page through a free tier and read what comes back. You will find, most of the time, that the boilerplate is handled and that three or four words are genuinely uncertain. Those words are the actual job.

Then decide what those three or four words are worth. Sometimes the answer is nothing, because they are a witness's occupation. Sometimes the answer is that they are the surname the entire line hangs on, and ten dollars is the cheapest thing you will buy all year.

The mistake is not paying too much or paying too little. It is paying the same amount of attention to every page.

Canonical: https://kleiobase.com/blog/what-it-costs-to-get-an-old-record-read