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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

Grammarly is a great tool. I never forget to check my article with it before publishing. If you had asked me a few years ago how much would anyone pay for a Grammar-checking tool, I would have guessed it would be no more that $3-4 / month. Grammarly charges $29 a month. Of course, its value can be measured with the improved communication but $29 _is_ a lot. It's amazing that it convinced people that it's worth it.

High price point is the only reason why I haven't gotten around purchasing its premium plan even though I think it would very beneficial for me.

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$30/month is a lot, I agree with you there, but there is also the quarterly billing for $20/month, and the annual one for $12/month. I highly suspect that the monthly billing price is a decoy price to make the $20/month look cheaper.

Personally, I've been a premium user for more than a year now, and it has become an invaluable tool for me, especially as a non-native English speaker. $20/month is not too cheap, but I feel like it's worth it for the boost in professionalism that all my writing gets.

That's a good point regarding the $29/month being a decoy price. By the way for anyone curious, that concept I think is known as anchor pricing or price anchoring, if you want to read up on it some more.

If English is your second language, then I highly recommend their premium plan. Both my wife and I love it and how much it helps us in writing better English and getting better at it (in terms of that 'last mile' learning which could take up to a decade for most people to get perfect).

This is how Grammarly's premium edition would have corrected your post:

> Grammarly is a great tool. I never forget to check my article ~~with~~/on (Incorrect correction, think 'with' makes more sense here) it before publishing. If you had asked me a few years ago how much would anyone pay for a Grammar-checking tool, I would have guessed it would be no more ~~that~~/than (Probably a typo on your end, rather than a grammatical mistake) $3-4 / month. Grammarly charges $29 a month. Of course, its value can be measured with the improved communication but $29 _is_ a lot. It's amazing that it convinced people that it's worth it.

>~~High~~/The high (probably the most common mistake non-native English speakers do) price point is the only reason why I haven't gotten around purchasing its premium plan even though I think it would very beneficial for me.

Honestly, this doesn't read like much of a recommendation to me.

I think a native English speaker would probably write "I always check my article with it before publishing" - reversing the negation avoids the awkward "never forget to".

Meanwhile, that last sentence reads like perfectly reasonable conversational English to me: omitting the "the" emphasises the "High price point" part.

It seems that Grammarly will help you avoid the very common ESL type English errors (missing definite article, verb-subject agreement etc etc), which makes it worthwhile for many people, but it isn't going to get you over that final 'native speaker' grade hump.

They often have a 55% off discount, reducing the cost to $5 a month (If you make one payment of $60). English is my second language, this is sometimes useful. I may switch to premium.

So funny, if the MS of old saw someone was charging $29 a month for a feature, not a product, they would not sit idly by.

Perhaps this can serve as future guidance for those who soon look to encroach on Google or FB turf who may be afraid to act due to anti-trust enforcement.

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