In today's connected world, restricting yourself to one language means leaving money on the table. 75% of consumers prefer products in their native language.
Cost comparison
DIY (Google Translate): Hours, free (quality issues)
Human translators: 2-4 weeks, €2,000-€10,000 per language
ShipGlobal.dev: minutes, €19 per month + €10 per million tokens
Start with global expansion
Identify target markets - analyze analytics for non-English traffic
Prepare the codebase - support i18n, externalize strings
Start small, scale quickly - Begin with 3-5 strategic languages
Measure and iterate - track metrics per locale
The scalability problem
Stay local and compete in a saturated market OR go global and contend with translation overhead
Code → export strings → send to translators → wait days/weeks → import → test → deploy
How AI translation solves it
Cost efficiency: Pay only for what you translate
Developer-first: No context-switching, upload iOS .strings, Android strings.xml, or JSON directly
Quality: AI trained on app-specific content
Speed: translate thousands of strings in minutes
Code → Upload → Translate in minutes → Download → Deploy
Real success metrics
After: 15 languages, 500,000 users
Before: 1 language, 50,000 users
Fintech startup expanded from English-only to 15 languages in a week
10x user growth in 3 months
Fazit
Global expansion is no longer reserved for enterprise companies with large budgets.