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I got a banner warning today linking to this page. It was announced a while back, but I either didn’t see it or forgot.

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.

The key bit for people who can selfhost:

Yes. If you are a developer, you can still host and run your own instance of LanguageTool’s server. The browser extension will continue to work as it currently does for users who use it with their own server.

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    41·
    44 minutes ago

    Unfortunately, the browser extension is proprietary. They used to have an open source one but they stopped maintaining it.

    Proprietary was a dealbreaker for me. There is no way to verify that it isn’t selling everything I type even if I do have it configured to point at a local server.

    I’m also concerned that the extension may eventually no longer work against local servers as well.

    https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool-browser-addon/issues/247

    As an alternative, there is harper by wordpress: https://github.com/Automattic/harper

    It is webassembly and runs entirely in your browser.

    EDIT:

    I will add that the rest of the languagetool ecosystem continues to work fine. Libreoffice now has a built in client, which you can point at your own hosted server. VSCode [1] also has their own languagetool extension. I use those and those work great. But in the browser I use harper nothing. I should probably install harper.

    [1] Well, technically I use [code-oss]https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Visual_Studio_Code), which gets the extension from https://open-vsx.org/