Grammarly Review: 4/5 — Free Fixed My Grammar, Then Turned “Its” Into “It”

I already had a 56-word landing-page draft that sounded vague on purpose. Missing verbs, wrong homophones, the usual morning mess. I did not want another chat window to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. I wanted last-mile flags inside an editor — underlines I could accept or ignore — without pasting into a separate AI thread. So I opened Grammarly on Free and stayed there for one short morning session.

Hotmail got in anyway

Signup path was plain: grammarly.com → Sign up → email/password only. Address: forleoliang@hotmail.com. No Google. No Apple. No SSO. The field label said “Work or school email,” which usually means consumer domains get a polite rejection. Hotmail went through. No enterprise bounce, no “use your company domain” wall.

Verification code hit Outlook web in about a minute. All-folders search; message sat in Inbox, not Junk. Grammarly’s split OTP boxes bit me once — I mis-ordered the digits and got “Invalid code. Please try again.” Clicked the first box, retyped the full code clean. Instant verify. No Cloudflare puzzle. No card wall before the editor. That part was boring in a good way.

Onboarding asked what I was working on. I picked Other projects and Articles or blog posts. Right after that, the modal: “Try Pro for 10 days free!” with a fat “Try Pro for $0” button. I hit “No, thanks.” Did not start a trial. Did not enter a card. Free path stayed free.

Fifty-six words, score 55, ten flags

Inside app.grammarly.com I went Docs → New doc and pasted the whole sample in one go:

> I been working on a landing page copy all morning and its still sound vague. Their is three benefits we want visitor to notice, but the sentences keep dragging on and on without a clear call to action. If your reading this draft, can you tell me weather the tone feel too salesy or just confusing?

Word count blinked 0, then settled at 56. Suggestions showed up in a few seconds — not instant, not slow. Overall score landed at 55. Right sidebar: All 10 / Grammar 9 / Clarity 1, and a separate Pro suggestions count of 1.

What actually lit up against the traps I planted:

• I been — Verb problem
• its — Correct pronoun usage
• Their is — Rephrase
• weather — Use the right word
• plus and punctuation, sound subject-verb agreement, visitor wording, your word choice, feel subject-verb agreement

That is the core Free job I came for: paste messy copy, get a pile of concrete underlines, leave without paying. It did that. I did not need to invent a chat prompt to ask “please fix my grammar.”

The weird accept: its → it

I applied two cards only.

First: weather under “Use the right word.” One click → whether. Immediate swap on the canvas. The draft really contained “whether.” Homophone fix worked the way you expect.

Then its. Label: Correct pronoun usage. The line was ...and its still sound vague. In my head the fix is it's. The accept wrote `it`. Sentence became ...and it still sound vague. Possessive-versus-contraction mess traded for a bare pronoun that still leaves sound wrong. I kept the apply because that is what Free actually did on click — not what the label implied. Odd parsing for a product that has seen that typo forever.

After those two applies, the overall score moved 55 → 61. No lag. Surrounding formatting stayed put. I left Their is, I been, and the other flags alone so I could see the score move on a minimal edit pass.

Try Pro for $0, and what Free actually gets

The editor header kept “Try Pro for $0” pinned while I worked. Opening the plan screen brought the same pitch again: “Try Pro for 10 days free!” / “Try Pro for $0” / “No, thanks.” Loud. Consistent. Easy to decline if you look for the small link.

Comparison copy I saw on that screen:

• Free includes Brainstorm with AI chat and Write without mistakes
• Marked not available on Free: Rewrite full sentences in a click, Detect AI-generated text, Catch accidental plagiarism

No daily generation meter ticking down the way some rewrite tools do. Just the 56-word count and the writing-quality score. For basic grammar cards, that felt calmer than a burn-down counter — the Pro banner is still the noisy part.

I did not install the browser extension, open desktop or mobile apps, try Google/Apple SSO, start checkout, run the AI detector, try an AI rewrite/humanizer, run plagiarism, or fire full-sentence rewrites. This session stayed web Docs + Free suggestion cards + the plan screen.

If you need a dedicated canvas to catch verb mess and weather/whether without pasting into a chat, Free still does that without a card. Read every accept — the its → it swap is why I will not call this a 5. The trial CTAs will keep yelling. That combination is a 4 for me.

Final rating: 4 out of 5.