Hosted Service & Plans

The hosted backend at api.yakulang.com is the default for all yaku users. It requires zero configuration and produces higher-quality translations than local backends for many language pairs.

Why hosted?

	Hosted (`api.yakulang.com`)	Local (Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic)
Setup	None — works out of the box	Requires an API key and `backend` config
Prompt quality	Refined, per-language rules with few-shot examples for many language pairs	Universal, language-agnostic rules only
Cost	Free tier included	You pay your LLM provider directly
Streaming	Not supported	Supported (`--stream`)
Custom prompts	Not supported (`--prompt` is ignored)	Supported

When to use hosted: You want the best translation quality with no setup.

When to use local: You need streaming output, custom prompts, very long texts (over 50,000 characters), or want to avoid any external service.

Plans

	Anonymous	Free	Paid
Daily requests	50	50	Unlimited
Monthly requests	100	300	Unlimited
Max chars per request	5,000	10,000	50,000
How to access	No setup needed	`yaku login`	Coming soon

All plans use the same refined prompts and translation quality. The difference is usage limits only.

Checking your usage

Run yaku quota to see your current plan and usage:

yaku quota

Anonymous user output:

Plan:     Anonymous
Daily:    3 / 50 requests
Monthly:  15 / 100 requests
Max text: 5,000 chars per request

yaku also prints a hint to stderr: Log in for higher limits: yaku login

Free plan user output:

Plan:     Free
Daily:    12 / 50 requests
Monthly:  45 / 300 requests
Max text: 10,000 chars per request

Upgrading your plan

Anonymous → Free

Run yaku login to authenticate via your browser. This upgrades you from anonymous to the free plan immediately:

yaku login
# Opens your browser to complete authentication

yaku whoami
# Logged in as [email protected] (github)

You can authenticate with GitHub or Google. Credentials are stored in ~/.config/yaku/.credentials.

Free → Paid

Paid plans are not yet available. When they launch, you will be able to upgrade from your account dashboard.

Quota errors

When you exceed a limit, the hosted service returns a clear error:

Error: input too long (8000 chars). Hosted service limit: 5000 chars per request

Options:

Log in — yaku login upgrades anonymous (5,000 chars) to free (10,000 chars).
Split the text — break large files into smaller chunks.
Use a local backend — local backends have no character limit from yaku.

# Switch to a local backend for large texts
yaku --backend gemini --to en -f large-document.md