A popular Grammarly alternative is killing its browser extension unless you pay — blames AI in the process.

Anyone, myself included, who spends a lot of time writing will use a grammar-checking tool, such as Grammarly or the popular alternative, LanguageTool.

LanguageTool is a free and open-source grammar tool, which is reason enough for many to use it. Alas, the free part is going away, at least when it comes to the browser extension.

Users are now being prompted that they have 14 days of LanguageTool Premium, with a timer counting down how long is left. Everyone using the extension is being given this trial, it seems, though when it expires, you either need to start paying or stop using it.

"We have made the difficult decision to limit the use of LanguageTool’s browser extension to Premium users only. 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." — LanguageTool

I'll admit to being disappointed as a LanguageTool user. But also a little confused about where the blame of generative AI truly lands. LanguageTool offers AI features in its premium tier while simultaneously claiming most of its users are using it for free.

That suggests to me that those of us who haven't been using the generative AI feature on the free tier are potentially being punished to free up resources for those who are.

Or perhaps it's just the overall server costs that keep climbing, along with everything else. Either way, we're out of options to keep using the browser extension without paying.

To their credit, LanguageTool's team has at least offered some free alternatives its users could migrate to. Additionally, if you host your own LanguageTool server, you'll still be able to keep using the browser extension. The website is also remaining free to use.

But the benefit of the browser extension has always been a simple way to use LanguageTool on any text in any browser tab, checking in real time. I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet, but at least I've got a couple of weeks to figure it out.

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