Transifex subscription renewal

Last year, @gvanrossum and @AA-Turner proposed and got funding from @python/steering-council for a Transifex subscription (see python/steering-council#297). Adam has talked to the Transifex sales team and got an offer for $570 a month billed yearly ($6840 in total). The next billing is coming up in September. A screenshot from our dashboard:

Here is a little overview as to how we're using that plan:

• We pay for two billion words, we currently use 27,822 (0.0013911%) of that. To expand on that, all of those words are used for the Python The Documentary subtitles project.

  Documentation translation consumes zero paid words as they are free (and unlimited) for open source projects (interesting fact: TX itself was once open source). The paid quota is used only by an out-of-scope project; that's not something the PSF should be paying for. So the word allowance, the headline feature of this plan, is worth nothing to us.

• We pay for 50000 seats (a.k.a. translators) in our organisation, we currently have 1839 (I see there are some join requests I need to approve, so this number will jump up by a few people soon! :-), so we are at 3.678% capacity. Before we paid for this plan, we actually had a higher limit of infinity (I think we were grandfathered in to an old plan?), I'm not certain as to what will happen if we drop the subscription now. Hopefully we aren't locked-in.

• Email support: I unfortunately had to avail of this once (See Discourse post), but it was a pleasant experience, they have very good support staff. Without the paid plan, we would have to go through their Discourse forum, which can be a little slower.

• The 2000 "AI words" our plan includes, those were used up in the first few weeks. Since then the admins have been plagued by notification to update our plan to get more! :'-( This was essentially a built-in LLM translation feature, similar to Co-Pilot fixes on GitHub (and similarly pushy, too). Note that we also have unlimited machine translation (not tied to plan), which are and have been using for a long time, and I think has been working quite well.

• We can download the translation glossary via the TX API (this is a pretty new feature added ~2 months ago IIRC). This is useful to prevent the issue we had before where someone maliciously emptied it (that is however, no longer possible, as we've put restrictions in place).

• Localization Reports: a fancy dashboard ranking contributors, I don't think we've used this (we're not giving out bonuses at the end of the year ;-).

• The plan includes automatic translation propagation across different projects (i.e., Python versions). This has been quite helpful, but it's not something we can't do ourselves. Rafael is looking into writing a script for this we can run on GitHub actions.

• The plan includes other miscellaneous benefits, mostly targeted at corporations, so we don't avail of them. For regular translators, there's no practical difference with the plan.

Some additional context: Transifex is currently used by 11 (~42%) of the 26 translation projects. The other projects find a PR based workflow works better for them, one of the 11 however uses both, although this is troublesome with conflicts.

My opinion: I am a strong -1 against giving Transifex another $7000. It simply isn't worth it! The main and most expensive feature, i.e., the paid word quota, is worth nothing to us, since documentation words are already free. The other features we do use are minimal and many we can work around; I'd be +0 on keeping them if the plan were under ~$500/year. The open-source (free) plan served us well for years, and I think we can return to it.

I'm curious what others think, is this worth renewing in September, or should we return to the free plan?

CC @m-acieck @rffontenelle @JulienPalard @python/editorial-board @AA-Turner @gvanrossum

Esamina l’issue collegata dello Steering Council, i dettagli della dashboard di Transifex, l’elenco dei progetti di traduzione e il thread dei commenti. Il lavoro è completato quando si è raggiunta e registrata una decisione sul rinnovo dell’abbonamento o sul ritorno al piano gratuito, compreso qualsiasi follow-up necessario.