Access to the LanguageTool browser extension will become paid in 2 weeks, unless you are using a local model or selfhost it

5 months ago by Otter to c/selfhosted

Instantly check grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors with LanguageTool's AI-powered grammar checker. Enhance your writing in over 30 languages with ease.

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 55 points 5 months 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/...

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/...), which gets the extension from https://open-vsx.org/

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Starfighter 17 points 5 months ago

Harper is great, but it only does English. Really wish their "extensible core" was extended to other languages sometime.

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isVeryLoud 1 point 4 months ago

Wish you could plug it to your own model, then it could support whatever.

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ProdigalFrog 3 points 5 months ago

Thanks for mentioning harper, hadn't heard of it until now.

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pineapple 2 points 5 months ago

Seconded Ive never tried anything else but harper works well for me.

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water1309 12 points 5 months ago

From the accompanying FAQ:

Are there any free alternatives Yes. Our sister brand, QuillBot, offers a free grammar-checking and paraphrasing browser extension that works just as well as LanguageTool for English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. Give it a try Quillbot

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KarnaSubarna 5 points 4 months ago

You can self host the LT service as a docker container.

https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

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WhyJiffie 5 points 4 months ago

I would care if they haven't fucked people over and especially the open source community.

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wltr 3 points 5 months ago

Does anyone have any notes on how to self host it and ideally some feedback on what it is to self-host it?

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nykula 6 points 5 months ago

YunoHost application is here: https://apps.yunohost.org/app/languagetool

Docs for installing LanguageTool manually are here: https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server - version 20260528 works on Debian 13 under WSL, needs openjdk-25-jre-headless and the --public option. The extension settings have a localhost option, I didn't have to change anything else.

Note that premium as of today costs $2.50 per month if you pay for two years in advance. Running LanguageTool on a laptop isn't very fast for languages other than English, so paying them for the cloud might provide a better experience than self-hosting.

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wltr 2 points 5 months ago

Thanks a lot! I’d explore that. I don’t know about others here, but I’m not even considering a non-self-hosted solution. But it’s great to know upfront that it would require a powerful server to have languages other than English.

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