For as long as most of us can remember, the localization industry has run on a single, stubborn unit of measurement: the words. You count them, you price them, you invoice them. Simple.
But what happens when a large language model can draft thousands of those words in seconds, and a post-editor can process them by the hour? That’s the uncomfortable question at the heart of a recent conversation on The Agile Localization Podcast, where host Stefan Huyghe sat down with Diego Cresceri, Founder and CEO of Creative Words, to talk about what comes after the per-word era.
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Broken, but not going anywhere
Is per-word fundamentally broken, or just under pressure? Diego’s answer – it’s both.
The model made perfect sense when effort and output moved together on the same line. You produced words, you got paid. But that logic has snapped. With post-editing, you can process thousands of words every hour. The best LLMs can draft content in seconds. The link between effort and output is gone.
And yet, the model persists. Why? Because no one has agreed on what to replace it with. “Broken doesn’t mean it’s going away tomorrow,” Diego said. The industry has been talking about killing per-word pricing for months, maybe years, but we still haven’t defined what we’re actually selling.
Selling judgment, not words
This is where Diego got to the real pivot. Before we can fix pricing, we have to redefine the work itself. If a client asks what you charge per word today, it’s almost an awkward question. The more honest answer is that clients aren’t paying for words; they’re paying for judgment and accountability. Who made the decision? Who owns the outcome in that market? That’s the value. The words are just the delivery mechanism.
The subscription trap
Stefan then raised the trendy alternative: subscription-based localization. Diego sees the appeal: predictable, recurring revenue makes accountants smile. But he flagged two real risks. First, commoditizing quality: once you go flat-fee, clients expect software-as-a-service economics, and you end up pushed toward more volume at lower cost.
Second, content inflation: when producing more translation cost almost nothing extra, clients produce more of it, and quality quietly erodes.
His verdict is that subscription works beautifully for some clients and some content types. It absolutely does not work for legal, medical, or brand-defining content where every word carries weight. There’s no single pricing model that fits everything. Context still rules.
"A marketplace can connect you to supply and demand, but the most valuable thing that a platform like Crowdin can give you is to create an environment where good decisions happen. And such a platform can give localization managers the data that they need.
The governance question
Who should own multilingual content inside an organization? Diego’s diagnosis was sharp: right now, nobody really does. Product treats it as a feature. Marketing treats it as a task to outsource. Legal only shows up when something breaks. The gaps are enormous.
His prescription: a dedicated function, with its own budget, ideally reporting to the CPO. Not a “translation coordinator who knows some tools”, but a genuine global content strategist who understands both the technical and cultural sides, and who has enough standing to push back when a product decision is going to wreck localization downstream.
On the perennial risk of governance becoming bureaucracy, Diego had a clean principle: automate the rules, let humans handle the decisions. Terminology, style guides, standard approvals – let AI handle those. Cultural risk, novel scenarios, brand calls – those stay human. And measure outcomes, not compliance. If the product isn’t performing in the market, your governance is useless, no matter how many approvals it logged.
Transparency as the real differentiator
Diego pushed hard on transparency, which he sees as still a competitive advantage today but rapidly becoming table stakes. LSPs make big promises about AI-powered workflows but stay vague about accountability, file handling, and which tools they actually use. The real differentiator in the short term won’t be transparency itself; it’ll be trust.
Final thoughts
Where has human expertise become more valuable? Cultural judgment. Understanding the purpose of a text, aligning it to what a brand wants to communicate, and mastering your own native language at a level AI can’t touch. Translation is a means to something else. The future belongs to people who deliver intelligence on top of the output, not just the output itself.
Diego’s Background
Diego Cresceri is the Founder and CEO of Creative Words, an Italian language service provider based in Genoa, with over two decades of experience in localization and language services. A trained interpreter by education, he has evolved his career across all operational levels of the localization industry, positioning himself as a strategic thought leader on pricing models, AI-driven localization, and organizational governance.
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Yuliia Makarenko
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