TranslateMom: Revenue, team and how it was built
TranslateMom (AI video translation, subtitles and dubbing, with a translation bot on X, Canada): US$3.7K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026. Evidence grade A: disclosed by a company or a filing, or verified by a payment processor. Team: 1 founder, Monta Gao, who called it a side project in October 2025; headcount not published. Launched May 2023; still running, revenue falling.Added 27 October 2026
- Outcome
- US$3.7K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026Revenue falling
- Evidence
- A disclosed by a company or a filing, or verified by a payment processor
- Launch
- May 2023
- Status
- Still running
- Team
- 1 founder, Monta Gao, who called it a side project in October 2025; headcount not published
- Outside funding
- None reported
- Group
- Voice and audio
- Main channel
- Inside another platform
TranslateMom translates the speech in videos. It first runs speech recognition, a model that writes down the words spoken in an audio track, then machine translation, a model that translates that text into another language, and shows the result as timed subtitles. It can also do dubbing: replace the voice track with a generated voice that speaks the translation. The product has two faces. On the website, a paid user uploads a file or pastes a link and spends credits, a prepaid unit in which one credit buys one minute of transcription and translation. On X, the account @TranslateMom is a bot, a program that posts by itself: it replies to videos with a translated, subtitled version.
The founder appears as Monta Gao in the website's own structured data, and as Monta Kaoh on Product Hunt and @montakaoh on X. They built the bot in May 2023 as, in their words, "a simple Whisper + Google Translate loop", and later wrote that in 2023 "There was no real revenue". On 29 October 2025 they called it "a $2k+ MRR side project with over 100k active users on X", and at a Product Hunt launch on 17 November 2025 they wrote that it "made over $50k this year". On 27 October 2026, TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment accounts, showed monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$3,736 from 240 active subscriptions, US$54,245 of revenue in the last 12 months and US$143,369 since the start.
The TrustMRR figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them through API keys from Stripe, which takes the card payments on the website, and from RevenueCat, a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers. The founder's statements are grade C. Monthly revenue has stayed between about US$3,600 and US$5,100 since March 2026, and the business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since December 2025 at US$120,000. The page also shows earlier companies that sold translation, or that grew on top of Twitter and lost when the platform changed.
How much revenue does TranslateMom make?
Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.
| Fact | Value | Grade | How we know | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026 | US$3,736 from 240 active subscriptions | A | TrustMRR snapshot, read from Stripe and RevenueCat through API keys, last synced 27 October 2026. Down 5.4% in 30 days. Calculated: US$15.57 per subscription per month, and US$44,832 a year at that rate, which is the headline figure of this page. | [1] |
| Revenue in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026 | US$3,294 | A | TrustMRR gives growth of -35.0% over the 30 days before. Calculated: those earlier 30 days brought about US$5,068. | [1] |
| Revenue in the last 12 months, to 27 October 2026 | US$54,245 | A | TrustMRR. Last 6 months: US$24,453. Last 3 months: US$11,791. Calculated: US$4,520 a month on average. | [1] |
| Revenue since the start, to 27 October 2026 | US$143,369 | A | TrustMRR all-time figure. Calculated: US$89,124 of it came before the last 12 months, that is from 2023 to October 2025. The profile says it is not a merchant of record, so Stripe and RevenueCat are the only payment sources it reads. | [1] |
| Revenue by month | US$6,743 in November 2025, US$3,595 in January 2026, US$6,422 in February 2026, US$5,111 in September 2026 | A | TrustMRR monthly table. From March to September 2026 every month was between US$3,601 (August) and US$5,111 (September). October 2026 to the 27th: US$2,839. | [1] |
| Trend of the revenue | -6.9% over 3 months, -17.9% over 6 months | calc | Calculated from the TrustMRR periods: the last 3 months (US$11,791) against the 3 months before (US$12,662), and the last 6 months (US$24,453) against the 6 months before (US$29,792). This page calls the trend flat because monthly revenue has stayed in the same band since March 2026; it is below the November 2025 and February 2026 peaks. | [1] |
| MRR stated by the founder, 29 October 2025 | "$2k+ MRR", with "over 100k active users on X" | C | Founder's field report on the company blog, which calls TranslateMom a side project. Calculated: the verified MRR a year later, US$3,736, is 1.87 times US$2,000. | [3] |
| Revenue stated by the founder for 2025 | "over $50k this year", with "almost 80k total signups" | C | Founder's comment at the Product Hunt launch, 17 November 2025. The same comment gives 10,000 page visitors a day and more than 5,000 code commits. TrustMRR's monthly table starts in November 2025, so it cannot confirm the 2025 total. | [2] |
| Visitors in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026 | 15,106, and US$0.20 of revenue per visitor | B | TrustMRR reads the traffic from the company's Google Analytics account. Calculated: 15,106 times US$0.20 is about US$3,021. | [1] |
| Profit margin, last 30 days | 65.0% | C | TrustMRR snapshot. The profile's verification statement covers revenue, MRR, customers, subscriptions and churn, not costs, so the margin is not counted as verified here. | [1] |
| Sale listing | US$120,000 asked, listed on 4 December 2025 | C | TrustMRR, 27 October 2026: 9 offers received and a revenue multiple of 3.0. Calculated: 3.04 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12, and 2.21 times the revenue of the last 12 months. No sale has been reported. | [1] |
| Start | May 2023 | C | The founder: "I built @TranslateMom in May 2023, before X rolled out Grok." TrustMRR's founded date is 2 June 2023. The Internet Archive holds a copy of translate.mom from 1 June 2023. The website's structured data gives 2024 as the founding date of the organization. | [3, 1, 12, 4] |
| First version | "a simple Whisper + Google Translate loop" | C | Founder, October 2025. Whisper is OpenAI's speech recognition model. The GitHub page says the product "began as a weekend hack to watch chinese cooking videos". | [3, 9] |
| Founder and company | Monta Gao; 15509947 Canada Inc. | C | The website's structured data names "Monta Gao" as founder, with the X account @montakaoh. Product Hunt shows the maker as "Monta Kaoh" and TrustMRR as "Monta". The site footer names 15509947 Canada Inc., and TrustMRR gives the country as CA. | [4, 2, 1] |
| Team | 1 founder; headcount not published | C | The home page says "made by @montakaoh", the blog guide is signed "-Monta", and the founder writes "I built" and "side project". No source names staff. The Product Hunt comment uses "we" and "us" in places. | [4, 11, 3, 2] |
| Outside funding | none reported | C | No source read here mentions investors. | [1, 2] |
| Followers of the bot on X | more than 100,000 | C | Founder on Product Hunt: "built the translator bot to over 100k followers". TrustMRR's profile text says the same. X itself could not be read. | [2, 1] |
| Public transcript pages of translated X videos | 81,696 videos from 28,339 accounts, 498,308 views | C | Counter on the company's transcripts page, 27 October 2026. | [10] |
| Product Hunt launch | 17 November 2025, 13 points, rank 27 of the day, not featured | B | Product Hunt's own record of the launch: 16 points on launch day, 4 comments, 25 followers of the product. | [2] |
| Oldest X post quoted on the home page | 29 June 2023 | calc | Calculated from the post's number on X: the number divided by 2 to the power 22, plus 1,288,834,974,657, is the time in milliseconds. The post is a thank-you to TranslateMom. | [4] |
| Time from the start to the October 2026 figure | 41 months | calc | Calculated: May 2023 to October 2026. | [3, 1] |
How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe and RevenueCat accounts. A grade B value is a record kept by an independent party (the Internet Archive, Product Hunt, or traffic read by TrustMRR from Google Analytics). A grade C value is a statement by the founder or by the company's own pages. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.
| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | 0 | 0 | 60 minutes of transcription and translation, once; no dubbing |
| Starter | 4.50 | 9 | 200 credits a month; AI dubbing in 29 languages |
| Plus | 9 | 18 | 600 credits a month; GPT-4o; priority queue; download of source videos |
| Pro | 22 | 44 | 2,000 credits a month; custom branding; HD video import |
| Custom or enterprise | custom | custom | by email |
One credit buys one minute of transcription and translation together. Transcription with the Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview model costs 2 credits a minute, and AI dubbing costs 35 credits a minute, so the 200 credits of the Starter plan dub about 5.7 minutes. New accounts get free trial credits for 60 minutes. Permanent credits are sold as one-time purchases that never expire; the pages read here do not give their price. Yearly billing costs half of the monthly price. TrustMRR lists the same three plans as US$4.50, US$9.00 and US$22.00 a month.
When did TranslateMom launch, and how did it grow?
From a weekend bot on X in May 2023 to a for-sale listing with US$3,736 of monthly recurring revenue in 41 months. Each entry carries its grade.
- May 2023CThe founder builds the @TranslateMom bot on X as a loop of Whisper and Google Translate. The GitHub page says it began as a weekend project to watch Chinese cooking videos. [3, 9]
- 1 June 2023BThe Internet Archive saves its first copy of translate.mom, a page titled TranslateMom. [12]
- 2 June 2023CFounded date on the TrustMRR profile. [1]
- 2023CThe founder asks a person they met in Taiwan for advice about TranslateMom. They wrote later: "There was no real revenue but I felt the idea was validated at that point". [2]
- 29 October 2025CA field report on the company blog compares the bot with Grok, X's own assistant, and calls TranslateMom "a $2k+ MRR side project with over 100k active users on X". [3]
- November 2025AUS$6,743 of revenue, the best month in the TrustMRR table. [1]
- 17 November 2025CLaunch on Product Hunt with 13 points. The founder writes that TranslateMom "made over $50k this year" and has almost 80,000 sign-ups. [2]
- 4 December 2025CListed for sale on TrustMRR. [1]
- February 2026AUS$6,422 of revenue, the second-best month in the table. [1]
- March to September 2026AMonthly revenue stays between US$3,601 and US$5,111. [1]
- 19 August 2026CThe credits documentation, updated that day, lists the Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview transcription model at 2 credits a minute and dubbing at 35 credits a minute. [6]
- 27 October 2026AMRR of US$3,736 from 240 active subscriptions, US$54,245 in 12 months, still listed at US$120,000 with 9 offers. [1]
Why did TranslateMom work?
Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.
Answer where the question is asked
People who see a video in a language they do not speak ask for a translation in the replies. The bot answers there, with the video subtitled in their language and, by default, the transcript of the original speech. The founder's comment on Product Hunt says that the niche of viral videos on X built the bot to more than 100,000 followers. The product page on Product Hunt points to the bot's replies as the place to see the product.
A website for the longer jobs
The bot is free. Files of up to 4.5 hours, dubbing and exports without a watermark are on the website, paid in credits: 200 minutes a month for US$4.50 billed yearly or US$9 billed monthly. The price rises with the minutes, so heavy users pay more, and the cost of the models, which also rises with the minutes, stays covered.
Other companies' models, chosen per job
The first version joined Whisper, OpenAI's speech recognition model, to Google Translate. The current product lets the user choose translation engines, including DeepL, offers GPT-4o on the higher plans and a Gemini transcription model at twice the credit price. The founder builds the parts around the models: the subtitle editor, the styling, the exports and the bot.
Pages that search engines can find
The founder wrote that they learned about SEO, or search engine optimization, and that the site reached 10,000 visitors a day by November 2025. The site has free tools (video downloaders, subtitle format converters) and public pages with the transcripts of 81,696 translated X videos, each a page that a search engine can show.
How it was built
These details come from the founder's posts, the company's own pages and the public source of its web pages. The page-source items are grade B; the rest are grade C. [3, 9, 7, 6, 8, 4, 10, 1, 2]
- The first version was a bot on X that joined Whisper and Google Translate, built over a weekend to watch Chinese cooking videos.
- Translation engines are selectable, and the FAQ says that not all languages work with DeepL. The Plus and Pro plans add GPT-4o, and a Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview transcription model costs 2 credits a minute.
- Dubbing generates new voices in 29 languages at 35 credits a minute; the GitHub page describes the beta as AI voice cloning with adjustable pitch and speed.
- The website is built with SvelteKit. Its page source loads videos from Cloudflare Stream, calls a Google Cloud Functions endpoint, and uses Plausible and PostHog for analytics and Crisp for support chat.
- Payments: Stripe on the website and RevenueCat, a service that records app-store subscriptions, both read by TrustMRR. There are also an iPhone app, a Mac app and a Chrome extension.
- The core code is closed. A public GitHub repository holds the documentation, the issue tracker and the roadmap.
- The company is 15509947 Canada Inc. The founder reports more than 5,000 code commits by November 2025.
Tools named in the sources
Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.
Who tried this before TranslateMom, and why did they fail?
Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold translation, or grew on top of Twitter and lost when the platform changed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.
TurboTranslations
The promiseFaster, cheaper translations from a marketplace of human translators.
Why it diedNeural machine translation became good enough for most texts, and a human marketplace could not compete on price.
Meerkat
The promiseLive video streams from a phone, shared with your Twitter followers.
Why it diedIts growth ran through Twitter's social graph. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and cut Meerkat's access to the graph.
ThinkUp
The promisePersonal analytics on top of your Twitter and other social accounts.
Why it diedThe platforms improved their own analytics and restricted API access, and larger tools offered more.
Koo
The promiseA Twitter-like network in Indian languages, for people who do not post in English.
Why it diedDownloads came from a political moment; most users only watched, and engagement stayed too low to pay for the service.
The failed startups come from Loot Drop, a free database of dead startups, retold here in our own words. Loot Drop describes its entries as AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so these cards carry no evidence grade.
What changed
TurboTranslations sold human translation and died when machine translation became good enough. TranslateMom is built on that change: it sells machine translation of speech for a few dollars a month, and pays other companies for the models by the minute. Meerkat and ThinkUp grew on Twitter and lost when the platform cut their access or built the feature itself. TranslateMom carries the same risk: its bot depends on X, and since 2025 X's own assistant, Grok, also translates videos. The founder wrote that mentions of the bot dropped slightly as Grok improved.
Two things differ. First, the paid product does not live on X: the website takes files and links from YouTube, TikTok and other sites, and charges through its own Stripe account and the App Store. Second, the business is small enough for one person: a 240-subscription business with US$54,245 of revenue in 12 months does not need the scale that Meerkat and Koo raised money for.
Can one person copy TranslateMom now?
The bot-in-the-replies method, yes. This exact niche, with care.
A free bot that answered translation requests inside X brought the product its users, and a credit-priced website turned some of them into subscribers. The niche is now shared with the platform's own assistant, so a copy should start where no official assistant does the job well.
Where it is still open: Other requests that people make in public replies: summaries of long videos, captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, and translation on platforms whose own assistant does not translate video.
- 1Find a request that people already type in public replies, and answer it there with a bot that shows its work.
- 2Put the full service on your own website and charge by the minute in credits, so the price follows the cost of the models.
- 3Let users choose between models and charge more credits for the expensive one.
- 4Take payments on your own Stripe account and the App Store, not only inside the platform where the bot lives.
What could go wrong for TranslateMom?
The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.
Automatic replies to people who asked Grok
The founder's field report of 29 October 2025 says: "Every time someone tags Grok to translate a video, TranslateMom replies with its own answer." So the bot also answers people who did not mention it. This is the founder's own way of reaching users, through an automated account; this page has not checked it against X's rules for automated accounts.
Other people's videos and voices
The free tools download public videos from YouTube ("Save public YouTube videos or audio"), TikTok and X, and the Plus plan includes "Download original source videos". The transcripts page publishes translations of 81,696 X videos from 28,339 accounts. No source read here says that the owners of those videos agreed, or discusses permission or fair use. The GitHub page describes dubbing as "AI voice cloning"; the dubbing documentation presents it for "your content".
Logos and counts that are not verified
The home page shows "Trusted by industry leaders" with the logos of Apple, Google, The New York Times, NYU, UC Berkeley, University College London and Team Coco, and TrustMRR's profile text repeats it. No source says how these organizations use the product. A blog page says "Join over 101,434 creators" and "Boost engagement by up to 80% globally" without a source. The testimonials link to posts on X and to Trustpilot reviews, which this page could not open.
Small, uneven revenue, and for sale
Revenue in the last 30 days fell 35.0% against the 30 days before, and the last 6 months brought 17.9% less than the 6 months before. Monthly revenue has stayed between US$3,601 and US$5,111 since March 2026, below the US$6,743 of November 2025. The owner has offered the business for US$120,000 since December 2025; a buyer would take over a one-person product whose free channel is a bot on X.
Depends on X and on model providers
The bot needs X to keep allowing it, and X's own assistant Grok now translates videos as well. The translation and speech models come from other companies (the founder names Whisper and Google Translate; the pages name DeepL, GPT-4o and Gemini), so their prices and terms set TranslateMom's costs.
Sources
The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.
- A TrustMRR: TranslateMom, markdown profile (data as of 27 October 2026)Read the markdown profile in full on 27 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions read from Stripe and RevenueCat; traffic from Google Analytics; the description, profit margin and sale listing are founder-provided.
- C Product Hunt: TranslateMom, product page with the maker's launch comments, 17 November 2025Read in full, including the maker's comments in the page data. Source for the 2023 revenue remark, the 2025 revenue and sign-ups, the bot's followers and the launch record.
- C TranslateMom field report, 29 October 2025: Please Stop Using GrokRead in full. Written by the founder. Source for the start in May 2023, the first version, the US$2,000 MRR statement and the replies to Grok requests.
- C TranslateMom home page, read 27 October 2026Read in full, including the structured data and the page source. Source for the founder's name, the company name, the logo wall, the testimonials and the technical traces.
- C TranslateMom pricing page, read 27 October 2026Read in full. The yearly prices are in the text; the monthly prices are in the page's structured data.
- C TranslateMom docs: Credits and Pricing, updated 19 August 2026Read in full. Source for the credit costs, the free trial credits, the permanent credits and the monthly prices.
- C TranslateMom FAQ, read 27 October 2026Read in full. Source for the translation engines, including DeepL.
- C TranslateMom docs: AI Dubbing, updated 19 August 2026Read in full. Source for the dubbing languages, cost and limits.
- C GitHub: montagao/translatemom, READMERead in full. The company's public repository for docs and issues. Source for the origin as a weekend project and the voice-cloning description of dubbing.
- C TranslateMom: Videos from X, translated (transcripts index), read 27 October 2026Read the counters and the first lists. Source for the number of public transcript pages.
- C TranslateMom blog, 12 February 2026: How to Translate X/Twitter VideosRead in full. Signed by the founder. Source for the website workflow and the creator count claim.
- B Internet Archive: translate.mom on 1 June 2023Read the archived copy. The page loads by script, so only its title, TranslateMom, is readable. Source for the site's existence on that date.
- C TranslateMom: free YouTube Video Downloader, read 27 October 2026Read in full. Source for the free download tool and its limits.
- C Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startupsLocal export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.