Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?

People who haven't heard of LLMs

LLMs are not nice to use for spell checking. I do not want to read a wall of text from LLM just to find a missed article somewhere and I want to receive feedback as I type.

Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its response with one sentence in the middle removed.

I think it is anyone who wanna make sure they write correctly. I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.

“Think of how poorly the average person writes, and realize half of them write worse than that.”

(George Carlin or something, quote's veracity depends on what you mean by “average.”)

I think everybody could benefit from having something like Grammarly on their computer. None of us writes perfectly, and it's always beneficial to strive for improvement.

Adam Engst from TidBITs, a person whose job has been writing things for all his life, also uses Grammarly:

https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-wr...

I haven't used Grammarly but for simple things like spelling mistakes, missed articles, or punctuation, wouldn't even Google Docs be enough?

I use it as a proofreader, not to improve my writing. It’s difficult to proofread your own work, and Grammarly is a useful assistant. Plus, I’m British and I often write on behalf of American clients. I’m pretty good at following US English standards because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but the odd Britishism slips through and Grammarly usually catches it (although a standard spell checker would too, I suppose).