How Puente’s Pricing is Structured
Puente is built around a deliberate principle: access to real-time translation should not require a subscription or an account. The pricing structure reflects this — every tier, from Free to Enterprise, can be activated without creating a login, linking an email address, or providing any personal information.
There are four individual tiers and one add-on layer (Profession Packs), plus two organizational plans for teams that need multi-staff access. For a complete comparison vs subscription apps, see the best voice translator with no subscription guide.
Free Tier
Cost: $0
Translations per day: 5
Account required: No
The Free tier is designed for infrequent use — enough for most tourist interactions, occasional cross-language household conversations, or single daily professional touchpoints. Five translations per day is a meaningful limit: it covers a restaurant order (one exchange), a quick direction request (one exchange), and a brief check-in conversation (three exchanges) within a single day.
Who this is for:
- A tourist visiting a country for a week who has one main meal interaction per day
- A parent whose child attends a school where a weekly progress note from a teacher needs translating
- A small retail business owner who occasionally assists a customer in another language
- Anyone who wants to evaluate Puente’s quality before deciding on a paid tier
The Free tier is not artificially degraded — it uses the same DeepL Voice engine, the same 109 languages, and the same conversation modes as Pro. The only constraint is daily volume.
Emergency Pass
Cost: $0.99
Duration: 24 hours, unlimited translations
Account required: No
The Emergency Pass is the right choice when translation need arrives suddenly and there is no time to evaluate a product or set up a plan. A family member arrives at an emergency room speaking only Haitian Creole. A car accident puts two non-English-speaking drivers at a roadside with a police officer. A traveler lands in a country where their phone has run low and they need to navigate an unfamiliar transit system.
At $0.99, the barrier to activation is intentionally minimal. The purchase completes in the App Store in under thirty seconds, and translation is available immediately. No daily limit applies for the 24-hour window.
The Emergency Pass is also useful as a trial mechanism — it gives a full day of unlimited use, which is enough to evaluate Puente across multiple interaction types before deciding whether to upgrade to Pro.
Day Pass
Cost: $1.99
Duration: 24 hours, unlimited translations
Account required: No
The Day Pass serves a specific user: someone with a concentrated, single-day translation need that exceeds the Free tier’s five-translation cap, but who does not anticipate ongoing use. Examples include:
- A weekend visitor attending a family event where most participants speak another language
- A professional attending a single cross-language meeting or appointment
- A traveler with one intensive day of navigation, shopping, or tourism where translation will be constant
The Day Pass costs $1.99. For comparison, a single Day Pass purchased once per week for six months totals roughly $52. Pro, purchased once, costs $9.99 permanently. The math makes Pro the rational choice for anyone who anticipates using Puente more than five times in a month — but for genuinely occasional, high-volume single-day use, the Day Pass is the correct tier.
Pro: Lifetime Unlimited
Cost: $9.99 one-time
Duration: Permanent
Account required: No
Pro is a one-time in-app purchase that unlocks unlimited translations, with no expiration and no recurring charge. It is purchased through the Apple App Store’s standard in-app purchase mechanism and applies permanently to the purchasing Apple ID across all devices signed into that account.
The math is simple: If you use Puente even once per month at the Day Pass rate, you reach the cost of Pro in five months. If you use it weekly, you reach it in five weeks. For any regular user — a healthcare worker with limited-English patients, a teacher with non-English-speaking families, a contractor working multilingual crews, a business owner in a diverse neighborhood — Pro is economically dominant over any of the time-limited options.
Pro also unlocks access to Profession Pack purchases and full compatibility with all conversation modes at unlimited volume.
Profession Packs
Cost: $2.99 each
Availability: Requires Free, Pro, or Day Pass access
Special: Emergency Pack includes a free 3-day trial
Profession Packs add specialized terminology to Puente’s translation engine for nine professional domains. See the full Profession Packs reference:
| Pack | Example terms |
|---|---|
| Medical | Dyspnea, PRN, diaphoresis, ecchymosis, contraindicated |
| Legal | Habeas corpus, withholding of removal, credible fear, Miranda advisement |
| Trades | Fall protection, GFCI, MSDS, OSHA 300 log, confined space entry |
| Restaurant | Allergen cross-contamination, mise en place, 86’d, cover count |
| Finance | Fiduciary, amortization schedule, encumbrance, beneficial interest |
| Education | IEP, 504 plan, grade-level proficiency, IDEA parental rights |
| Childcare | Developmental milestone, separation anxiety, incident report protocol |
| Biblical | Covenant, sanctification, eschatology, ecclesiastical |
| Emergency | Triage category, hemorrhagic shock, mechanism of injury, code status |
Generic translation engines frequently paraphrase or mistranslate domain-specific terms because they are optimized for broad vocabulary breadth, not professional precision. “Diaphoretic” becomes “sweaty.” “PRN” stays untranslated or becomes garbled. “Credible fear” — a legal term of art with specific procedural significance — gets rendered as a literal fear description. Profession Packs correct this by injecting domain-aware glossaries into the translation pipeline.
The Emergency Pack’s free 3-day trial is strategically important: first responders, emergency clinicians, and crisis workers should be able to evaluate the pack in real conditions before purchasing. The trial activates without payment information.
Organization Plans
Clinic Plan
Cost: $49/month or $499/year (save two months)
Staff capacity: Up to 10 devices
Account required: No
The Clinic plan is designed for small to mid-size healthcare practices, community health clinics, and specialty offices with limited-English patient populations. The administrator purchases the plan and receives a batch of activation codes — one per device. Codes are distributed to staff by any method (email, text, printed card) and activated with a single tap in the Puente app.
No MDM (mobile device management), no SSO (single sign-on), no IT department engagement, and no user account creation is required at any stage. A clinic manager can purchase the plan on a Monday and have all ten staff members running unlimited Pro translation by Monday afternoon.
The Clinic plan is compatible with HIPAA-aligned workflows. Puente stores no audio, no session transcripts, and no user data on any server — there is no server-side patient data to govern under HIPAA’s Business Associate Agreement framework.
Enterprise Plan
Cost: $149/month or $1,499/year
Staff capacity: Unlimited devices
Account required: No
The Enterprise plan serves larger organizations — hospital systems, regional construction contractors, multi-location restaurant groups, school districts, law firms — that need to deploy Puente across more than 10 staff simultaneously. Activation code batches scale to the organization’s size. The plan includes priority support access.
Like the Clinic plan, Enterprise deploys via activation codes with no account infrastructure, no app store enterprise account required, and no integration dependencies. Staff receive a code, activate, and gain immediate Pro access.
Summary: Choosing Your Tier
| Tier | Cost | Duration | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Ongoing, 5/day | Occasional use, evaluation |
| Emergency Pass | $0.99 | 24 hours | Crisis moments, first-time urgent need |
| Day Pass | $1.99 | 24 hours | Single intensive day |
| Pro | $9.99 | Lifetime | Anyone using Puente more than once/month |
| Profession Pack | $2.99 each | Lifetime | Professional domain terminology |
| Clinic | $49/mo or $499/yr | Subscription | Up to 10 healthcare/professional staff |
| Enterprise | $149/mo or $1,499/yr | Subscription | Unlimited staff, large organizations |
No tier requires an account. All tiers access the same 109-language engine, the same conversation modes, and the same privacy architecture.