LanguageTool Makes Its Browser Extension Paid Only

LanguageTool, the Grammarly alternative I use and recommend, will no longer offer its browser extension for free.

“We have made the difficult decision to limit the use of LanguageTool’s browser extension to Premium users only,” an announcement on the LanguageTool website explains. “The rise of generative AI has made it more challenging to sustainably monetize our offering. A majority of users use our products for free, and the relatively small percentage of Premium subscribers is all that is subsidizing our continuously increasing server costs. To improve our Premium experience and to sustain our business model, we’ll be making the LanguageTool browser extension available exclusively for paying customers.”

To be clear, I do pay for LanguageTool, as does my wife, at a cost of $69.99 per user per year. I do this because it works well, works in the apps and browsers I use, and, in my wife’s case, because the spelling and grammar checking in Microsoft Word is inexplicably terrible. But LanguageTool is also available for free, though now that free version no longer works with the browser extension. (Interestingly, LanguageTool recommends QuillBot, which I’ve never used, as a free alternative with a browser extension.)

Like Grammarly, LanguageTool is a spelling and grammar checking solution that, yes, uses AI to make writing suggestions too. Unlike Grammarly, which went downhill, quality-wise, in recent years, it also works very well, which is why I use it. The Premium version offers several useful features over the free version, including:

• Language translation capabilities between over 10 languages
• More advanced grammar checking
• Tone, voice, and other style suggestions
• Generative AI capabilities to help you write and email, document, or whatever else
• The browser extension, so you can use it everywhere

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea. You can also try LanguageTool Premium for 14 days before deciding whether it’s worth paying for. And the company offers an open-source LanguageTool server that you can host on your own hardware, if that’s of interest; the browser extension will still work with that type of configuration.