Why I stopped using Grammarly — and what I use for writing polish instead

I cancelled Grammarly Premium last year. Not because the tool got worse, but because I noticed I had stopped reading most of its suggestions. The red squiggles for typos still helped. The premium suggestions about clarity and tone went unread for months before I admitted that to myself.

This is not a “Grammarly is bad” piece. Grammarly is fine. It is a “what I actually use instead” piece — and the answer is more interesting than just “I switched to a different grammar checker.”

Why I Subscribed in the First Place

I started paying for Grammarly Premium in 2023 for the same reason most people do. The free version caught typos. The premium version promised to catch the deeper writing problems — weak word choice, passive voice, unclear phrasing, tone mismatch. I write enough professionally that an extra pair of editorial eyes felt worth $30 a month.

For the first few months, I used it. The suggestions were sometimes useful, often pedantic, occasionally wrong in ways that would have made my writing worse if I had accepted them. By month four, I had developed an automatic habit of dismissing most premium suggestions without reading them.

By month six, I was paying for software I actively scrolled past.

What Grammarly Premium Actually Does Well

Credit where it is due. Grammarly Premium is genuinely good at:

• Catching typos and basic grammar errors (this is also free)
• Flagging passive voice, when you actually want it flagged
• Suggesting word alternatives when you have used the same word three times in two paragraphs
• Catching subject-verb agreement and tense issues

If your main writing problem is fundamental correctness — if you are writing in a second language, or if you are early in a writing career and your drafts have basic errors — Grammarly Premium earns its $30 easily.

What It Does Not Do

The premium tier does not catch the things that actually make writing weak in 2026:

• Buried ledes: Grammarly does not tell you that paragraph one should have been paragraph four
• Weak hooks: the opening sentence that sets up nothing
• Vague claims: “many people think” when you mean “I think” or “three of my clients last month said”
• Padding: sentences that sound smart but add nothing
• Tone drift: starting confident and ending hedge-y, or starting professional and ending casual
• Structural problems: the section that should be cut entirely, the ordering that does not flow, the analogy that is working too hard

These are the actual editing problems in most professional writing. Grammarly Premium cannot see them because they are not grammar problems. They are judgment problems.

What I Use Instead

The replacement is not a different grammar checker. It is a different category of tool entirely.

For typos and basic errors: the free Grammarly browser extension. Same red squiggles, same correctness checks, $0/month.

For everything else: Claude.

Specifically, I paste a draft into Claude with a prompt like: Read this as a critical editor. Identify the weakest paragraph, where readers are most likely to lose interest, anything that sounds AI-generated or clichéd, and any claims that are unsupported. Do not rewrite anything — just diagnose.

What I get back is structural editing, not grammar editing. Claude tells me which paragraph is dead, which sentence is doing two jobs, which lede is buried in paragraph four. It points at the problem and lets me decide what to do about it.

That is not what Grammarly was ever trying to be. They are solving different problems. The realisation was that the problem I actually had was the structural one — not the grammar one.

The Cost Comparison

Net change: $30/month saved. Better editorial output. Same correctness on typos.

Who Should Keep Paying for Grammarly Premium

This is not universal advice. Grammarly Premium is genuinely the right tool for some people:

• Writers in their second or third language who want consistent grammar safety nets
• Writers who do not already have a Claude or ChatGPT subscription — the free Grammarly tier is genuinely thinner than the paid one
• Anyone whose work output is high-volume short-form (emails, support replies, social posts) where the friction of pasting into Claude is not worth it
• Teams using Grammarly Business for style consistency across multiple writers

For everyone else — particularly solo writers and freelancers with an existing AI subscription — the free Grammarly extension plus Claude is a stronger setup.

The Broader Pattern

The reason I noticed the Grammarly subscription in the first place is the same reason I notice most subscriptions eventually: I had stopped opening it. Not actively cancelled, not actively replaced — just used less and less until the monthly charge felt like background noise.

That pattern repeats with a lot of AI tools right now. The category is moving fast. Tools that were the right call in 2023 may be redundant by 2026, replaced not by direct competitors but by general-purpose AI tools that absorbed the use case.

The lesson is not “Grammarly is bad.” It is “audit what you are paying for every quarter.” If you have stopped opening a tool, you have already cancelled it in your behaviour. The card just has not caught up yet.

Related reading

• The Hidden Cost of AI Subscriptions: My 2026 Audit (and the Framework That Saved Me $2,200/year)
• 5 AI Tools I Quit Using in 2026 (and What I Replaced Them With)
• The 10 Claude Prompts I Copy-Paste Every Week as a Content Creator