Microsoft Stopped Offering a Free Endpoint. Read Frog Steps In.

What happened

If your translations recently stopped working with an error like Failed to refresh Microsoft token: 404, nothing is wrong on your side. Your settings are fine.

Read Frog's Microsoft Translator option relied on a free token endpoint that Microsoft published for translation in Edge. That endpoint no longer issues tokens to us, so every request now fails before it ever reaches the translation service.

We have not been told why, and we would rather not guess out loud. Most likely it is a policy change on Microsoft's side. What we can say clearly is that this is not something we can fix from inside Read Frog: there is no key we can add and no setting you can flip.

So this post is about what to use instead — starting with the option that costs nothing and takes about ten seconds.

The short version: if you can reach Google, switch to Google Translate. If you can't, Read Frog 1.55.0 opens early access to Built-in AI — no API key, no setup, just sign in.

👉 Apply for early access

If you can reach Google: switch to Google Translate

Google Translate is still free, still needs no account and no API key, and is completely unaffected by this change. For most people this is the whole fix.

Open the Read Frog popup, find the Providers section, and set the translation provider to Google Translate.

Your target language, styles, site rules, and everything else stay exactly as they were. Only the engine behind the translation changes.

If you can't reach Google: Built-in AI

Not everyone can reach Google's servers. For a long time, Microsoft Translator was the answer for those readers — and now it isn't. Leaving them with nothing was not an option we were willing to accept.

So Read Frog 1.55.0 opens up Built-in AI for page translation. We take care of the model for you:

	Before	With Built-in AI
API key	Required for any AI translation	Not needed
Setup	Pick a provider, paste a key, choose a model	Pick Built-in AI
Quality	Machine translation, phrase by phrase	A language model that reads the whole passage

Because it is a language model rather than a phrase-based translator, it handles the things that usually trip machine translation up: pronouns that depend on an earlier sentence, technical terms that need to stay consistent, and tone that should not turn every casual post into a press release.

1.55.0 opens this as early access

We are rolling it out in batches rather than all at once, so we can watch quality and cost with a smaller group first and fix what we find before it reaches everyone.

Want in early? Fill in the early access form and we will enable it for you in the next batch.

Being upfront about the limits

Here is the part we would rather say plainly than let you discover on your own.

Built-in AI requires you to sign in. Not to collect accounts — an open, no-login AI endpoint gets found by abuse farms within days, and a handful of scripts can drain a day of capacity before the people who are actually reading get any. Signing in is the lightest defence we found that keeps the cost of abuse on the abuser instead of on you.

Beyond that, every Built-in AI translation costs us real money. Not a rounding error — a per-request cost that grows with every page every reader translates. We would love to hand out an unlimited amount of it. We can't, and pretending otherwise would only mean you hit a wall later without warning.

So the free allowance is deliberately modest:

Signed in, you get a daily allowance at no cost, enough for regular reading.
Ultra members get a substantially larger allowance — enough to make Built-in AI a genuine daily driver.

We will publish the exact numbers when Built-in AI opens up, rather than let you discover them by hitting a wall.

If Read Frog saves you time every day, a membership is what keeps these servers running — and it's the most direct way to support the project. But it is a choice, not a toll gate. Everything below is still free.

Nothing was taken away from you

We want to be precise about this, because "free service becomes paid" is a story people have been burned by before, and it is not what is happening here.

If you like tinkering, you can keep using your own API key, with no limits from us. Bring a key from OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude, SiliconFlow, OpenRouter, or any of the 30-plus providers Read Frog supports — Read Frog will never meter it or take a cut. And if you would rather not deal with providers, keys, and model names at all, that is exactly what Built-in AI is for.
Google Translate, DeepL, and DeepLX are unchanged.
Local models still work. Ollama and LM Studio run entirely on your machine.
Read Frog is still open source, and the whole extension is still free to install and use.

Built-in AI was added for readers who had no good option left. It replaces nothing.

What to do now

Apply for early access first. Read Frog 1.55.0 has not shipped yet, and Built-in AI arrives with it. We enable it in batches and places are limited, so applying now puts you earlier in the queue — fill in the form.
This part needs no waiting. If you can reach Google, open the popup now, set the translation provider under Providers to Google Translate, and your translations work again immediately.
Once 1.55.0 reaches your browser, sign in to your Read Frog account and switch the translation provider to Built-in AI in that same place.
Like tinkering? You can still bring your own API key. Don't want to? Once 1.55.0 is out, an Ultra membership will give Built-in AI room to breathe — and it keeps the lights on here.

Thank you for sticking with us through a change we did not choose. If anything is still broken after you switch, come find us on Discord or open a ticket in our feedback centre — we read everything.