The Limits That Stopped Me Are Not on Grammarly's Pricing Page

I have never paid for a writing tool, so treat this as a report on the free one: what it did, and where it stopped. Where it stopped turned out to be the interesting part.

I only ever used Grammarly's free tier, for grammar and spelling, on somewhere between 10 and 25 pieces of my own writing. Two things stopped me. It would not check more than about 1,000 words in one go, so a long article had to be split. And after 5 checks it told me I was done for the day. I never paid for Grammarly, so I cannot tell you what the paid tier fixes.

Neither number is published

This is the part worth knowing before you plan your week around a free tool.

I read Grammarly's plans page on 2 October 2026. For the free plan it lists writing without spelling and grammar mistakes, seeing your writing tone, and 100 AI prompts. The paid Plus plan is ₹392 a month billed annually, or ₹1,000 a month if you pay monthly, and it adds full sentence rewrites, tone adjustment, unlimited personalised suggestions, plagiarism and AI detection, and 2,000 AI prompts.

What the page does not say, anywhere, is that the free plan checks about 1,000 words at a time, or that it stops after 5 checks in a day. Those are the two things that actually changed how I worked. The published difference between free and paid is a list of features. The difference I ran into was a pair of numbers nobody wrote down.

So when you read any free tier's feature list, understand what you are reading. It tells you which capabilities exist. It does not tell you how many times you may use them, and how many times is usually what decides whether the free tier is enough.

What a 1,000 word ceiling does to a long piece

An article of 1,800 words costs you two checks, and two halves do not add up to the same thing as one whole.

Split a piece in half and the tool sees each half as a complete text. It loses the thread across the break. A pronoun that refers back to something in the first half, a term you defined early and used later, a sentence that only reads badly because of the one before it: all of that sits across the seam where the tool is no longer looking. I was also choosing the split point myself, which means I was deciding what the tool got to see.

And a 1,800 word piece burns two of the day's five checks. Re-check after edits and it is four. That arithmetic is why the daily limit mattered more than I expected.

How I worked around it

1. Write the whole piece first and do not check anything. Early checks are the ones you waste, because the text is still changing.
2. Read it myself, out loud, and fix what I find. Most of what a checker flags on a first pass I can catch without spending a check.
3. Split at a real section break, never mid-argument, so each half reads as something complete.
4. Check each half once. That is two of the five.
5. Keep the remaining checks for after the edits, which is where the new mistakes get introduced.

None of this is clever. It just stops me finding out at 11pm that today's checks are gone and the piece is not finished. The same thinking applies to the plagiarism pass in how I check a claim before publishing: the free tools are enough if you run them once, at the end, on text you have already finished.

When paying would be the answer

I have not bought the paid tier, so I cannot tell you whether ₹392 a month is good value. I can tell you what would push me to it.

If you write a long piece every day, you will hit the daily wall often, and a wall you hit daily is a fair reason to pay. If your pieces are short and occasional, which is closer to my own pattern, I got 10 to 25 of them through the free tier without paying anything.

And test the limits on your real work before you decide either way. Use the length you actually write, as many times as you actually write it, rather than a sample paragraph. The limits that stopped me were not on the pricing page, so the pricing page was never going to answer this for me.