Grammarly Is Acquiring Coda | Hacker News Reader

Grammarly Is Acquiring Coda

grammarly.com

18 pointsRutledge8 comments

Grammarly has been having an identity crisis ever since LLMs made grammar checking accessible to every company at a fraction of the cost. ChatGPT is killing a lot of companies and grammarly was the first collateral.

This acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge red flag to Coda users.

However it's high time Grammarly evolves itself into some other product or die trying.

Yup.

I also dislike Grammarly because they made it unnecessarily difficult to cancel my yearly subscription. Instead of allowing me to cancel on my own, they forced me to start a thread with their support team, which felt frustrating and inconvenient.

Additionally, I found Grammarly’s approach a bit aggressive, and it often conflicted with other plugins.

ProWritingAid is another plugin that was awfully buggy.

I switched to LanguageTool, which I genuinely love and support. However, to be honest, I’ve always felt that basic features like grammar checking, proofreading, and editing should be built directly into the operating system, rather than requiring additional plugins. Even LanguageTool isn’t compatible with every app, which can be limiting.

Thanks to advancements in LLMs, I’m finally hopeful that this functionality will become standard, eliminating the need for tools like LanguageTool altogether.

That said, it’s probably a long way off, especially considering how lackluster Apple’s AI capabilities have been so far.

For context, Coda's last valuation was $1.4B in July 2021 and Grammarly's was $13B in November 2021. Grammarly's revenue is likely taking a hit with the rise of LLMs and they were always at risk of being a feature by not owning the document editor itself. An all-in-one approach to compete with Notion (and Google Docs, Confluence, Sharepoint, etc) makes sense, but time will tell if this merger works.

Ah, this makes the acquisition more reasonable. Nonetheless, if it weren't for the respective companies' valuations, this would still seem very backward to me (i.e. extension for document editors acquiring a document editor). Keeping Coda's CEO seems promising, yet I fail to see how Grammarly as a product/collection of features would help the combined company.

Coda is an incredibly powerful doc platform -- I first discovered it while working at a previous startup, and it became my absolute favorite.

On my last week there, I built out a rip-off of Guitar Hero in Coda itself. We had a "multiplayer" doc where 20 of us competed (and cheated) for the top score. I didn't get a recording of that session, but here's a pre-game demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs23O3vewvg

This is great :) and pretty impressive that it was possible in coda!

Post from the Coda blog: https://coda.io/blog/about-coda/grammarly-acquires-coda

New chapter in the AI arms race

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