Is i18n-keyless free, and what happens if the service shuts down?

i18n-keyless is free if you self-host it, and its hosted option starts from €4/month. The site also has a dedicated section titled "What if the service shuts down?", which points to the same answer: because a self-hosted version exists, you are not locked into the hosted service. If the hosted product were discontinued, self-hosting is the fallback. The exact terms of any shutdown or migration path are not spelled out in the available page content, so treat self-hosting as your continuity plan rather than assuming a formal guarantee.

What "free" means here

The pricing signal on the site is: Free self-hosted, or from €4/month.

That splits into two distinct offers:

The site's call to action is "Get API Key for One App," which suggests the hosted entry point is scoped per app. The page does not state what the €4 tier includes beyond that, so check the pricing page before committing.

Why the shutdown question has a real answer

Most i18n SaaS products leave you with a problem if they disappear: your translations live in their system, and your app breaks or shows raw keys. i18n-keyless is structured differently, and that changes the risk profile.

The product is keyless. Instead of maintaining a key system, you edit one file, and there is no locale JSON to load and no merge conflict. The site's framing is that you "don't care about the i18n system at all" — you write real text, and translation is handled by AI.

That design has two consequences for continuity:

• Your source content is your own code. You are not authoring a parallel key namespace that only the vendor can resolve.
• The self-hosted option is the same product. So the fallback is not a degraded export; it is running the thing yourself.

The site explicitly raises "What if the service shuts down?" as a heading, which indicates the vendor treats it as a legitimate buying objection rather than avoiding it. What the page does not provide is a written SLA, a data-export format, or a stated notice period. If those matter to you, ask before you buy.

How to decide between self-hosting and paying

Use the same dimensions for both:

• Cost: free vs. from €4/month.
• Operational burden: you run and update the service vs. the vendor does.
• Continuity: self-hosting is inherently independent of the vendor's survival; hosted depends on the vendor staying up.
• Setup speed: the site advertises a 5-minute setup, and the hosted path starts with an API key, which is the faster route.

A reasonable rule: if your team already runs its own infrastructure and you want the shutdown question to be a non-issue, self-host. If you want to ship this week and €4/month is trivial, start hosted — but confirm you can move to self-hosted later without losing translations.

What the product actually does, briefly

The pitch is aimed at agentic coding: one file to edit, no keys, no locale JSON, no merge conflicts. The site lists one API and twelve SDKs, covering React (React Native, Expo, Next.js, Remix, TanStack Start, Astro), Vue (Nuxt), Angular, plain HTML (Svelte, Alpine, htmx via one script tag), Node.js, Laravel/PHP, Rails/Ruby, Flutter/Dart, Swift (iOS, macOS, Vapor), Kotlin (Android, Ktor), Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI), and Go.

The claimed pain it removes: setting up a key system costs at least an hour of senior dev time, and each new key costs about a minute — the site's own math is 500 keys × 2 languages ≈ 17 hours of back-and-forth. With keyless i18n, offline worst case shows untranslated real words instead of something like someheader.welcome.title.

Bottom line

Free if you self-host; from €4/month if you don't. The shutdown risk is mitigated by the existence of the self-hosted option, which the site itself presents as the answer to that question — but the page does not document a formal continuity guarantee, export format, or notice period, so verify those directly if they are decision-critical.