Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel

I suspect Google did the same thing with docs. The last time I tried it, about 10% of the suggestions were simply incorrect.

I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.

What is Grammarly anymore, even? Is it Superhuman? Is it Fathom? And what are either of those even?

Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn't totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.

The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.

Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.

It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.

But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.

But think of how productive you'll be when everyone slops you emails and then you have an agent slop you a summary of all the slops you got slopped into your slop box!

Grammarly does use AI https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-to-acquire-... since 2025.

Don’t forget that email won’t actually be read on the receiving side either. The recipient will just ask their LLM to summarize it in a few bullets.

I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.

> but models have become increasingly good at writing.

That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.

I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.

They are losing because they embraced AI at the detriment of what they where doing well.

It was a good tool, that worked, paid for it for a couple of months and then they decided to go with AI and using my writing for training.

What are the alternative AI solutions?

> pre-AI era

That is a very bad shortening for "pre-laymen-take-of-AI". Let us try to keep language clean at least here.

If the product in question replaces a tutor, it is AI ("simulation of intelligence"). We cannot restrict the term "AI" to "giving a broader appearance of intelligence with less trust in the results". Either this is still the "AI era" (post cybernetics, post Dartmouth), or we are not there yet.

Grammarlynis using AI.

Models are not good at writing. Like, they are just not producing good writings. They produce differently bad writing.

Consumer protection applies to individual consumers, not businesses. OP looks like a business.

Unless you're in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you "well they're not in our country so we can't do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won't, for some stupid reason like "did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?"), they will just say "ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we'll tell you how all of this will work out".

Or maybe I'm just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.

Good luck actually getting them to do something. Also "Europe" is an entire continent with many different countries and laws, you might want to be more specific.

What are you going to report? There’s nothing illegal going on here.

I tried to report Linkedin for their practices and it was like spitting at the sky trying to hit God

Lmao no. First press games are a scammer company based in Germany. I reported them to the Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband...nothing.

I reported them to the UKICC and got a reply after like 7 months asking for more information (I'd given them plenty) and that they were very busy and it would probably take another year to look at it. I told them not to bother.

In the UK that would be trading standards, and unless it's a local shop selling un-taxed cigarettes they're useless.

You can use Grammarly via an API, or simply submit text in a web interface.

It's a keylogger in the same way Vim is a keylogger.

Doesn't appear to be what's happening though.

> We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses

Not "our app".

It's a keylogger.

They are an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it's all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they're shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.

I have a rule, if I hear an advert that I didn't search for on any video site, I say "fuck off <company name>" to ensure I form a negative association with the brand. I've definitely heard "grammarly" far too many times to ever spend a penny on them.

Slack tries to sell to employees as well though, there are feature CTAs I see all the time trying to get me to express interest so they can tell the admin/owner of the account "Your employees want this feature, pay us more money".

I find it incredibly disrespectful.

Counterpoint: don’t spam my users or I’ll cut off contact at the network level and block your app from running on our laptops.

I have a grammar book, and my old AP style guide from college on my desk to ward off the evil spirits of spyware add-ons.

Properly funded public education.

Grammarly itself is basically a closed-source version of LanguageTool https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

It depends on what you mean by “good alternative”.

We use a self-hosted OSS LanguageTool server that's containerized and runs in a private, on-prem cluster to provide good performance and be HA, but it only works on our corporate network or when using a VPN connection while roaming/remote.

It's incredibly reliable.

It's also devoid of AI/LLM bullshit for writing. Spelling and grammar rules, a few notes about long sentences, that's it.

However, LanguageTool nerfs their other plugins (like mail plugins) to require a subscription service.

I've pleaded with them for years to please allow me to pay a subscription price but use our internal server simply because we don't want/need a spelling/grammar tool to send content to the cloud.

We don't want free. We want private.

The odd thing is that the official LanguageTool browser plugins DO allow use of a self-hosted LanguageTool server; clearly it's doable. There's a poorly maintained obsidian plugin that also works(ish). But that's about it.

We live with these limitations.

I'm surprised people get worked up about this. I've felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?

It's in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we're the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we're doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.

They also send an email with a template to send to the IT department

I think "unhinged" is a ridiculous word for it. They aren't crazy.

"Outrageous" is better. This will work on a lot of people, and they really will email their managers, because they're sheep. But it won't actually change the managers' minds for the positive. If I got wind of a plot like this against my decision, it would absolutely convince me to stay the course.

If the employees want to complain, I'll listen. If they're encouraged to complain, forget it.

The thing that didn't happen does sounds reasonable.